WEIRTON, W.Va. – Most people in this town will tell you they would rather take a physical punch to the gut than hear the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate plant, which directly cost jobs. 900 people.
It’s not just workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; the closure also threatens the jobs of thousands of other people whose businesses supported the plant: barbershops, gas stations, diminutive grocery stores and machine shops that produce gadgets for the steel industry. There is also a decline in the tax base, which affects the school district and road quality.
Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked at Weirton Steel. Now the last 900 employees have lost their jobs.
“This is yet another scar to add to what those in power have done to our lives and our community over the last 40 years,” said one employee, who declined to give his name, adding: “Honestly, how many times has this story “We must be told before someone in power takes care of our lives.”
He points to various buildings in the city center and for him they all “were like this” and “used to be like that”.
Ryan Weld, 43, of Wellsburg, grew up in downtown Weirton, just behind a local funeral home.
“When I was growing up in the 1980s, the steel mill was still in full swing and Weirton Steel employed 10,000 people, including my grandparents,” he said.
A Republican state senator said things started to tardy down here in the mid-to-late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed: “It dramatically changed the landscape of downtown, from a bustling Main Street to a dead street. “I am part of the last age group that remembers the shops, stores and restaurants in the city center.”
He believes that NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, made it fundamentally harder for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and pricey Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, to compete with places like Mexico. All the towns up and down the Steel Valley were dying hard.
“The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to adequately enforce trade regulations is nothing more than empty mills and unemployed workers,” Weld said. “It was true in the 1980s and 1990s and it is true today.”
Forty years ago, the Democratic Party began slowly shedding its working-class base, but not quickly: Democratic officials continued to show up at union rallies for decades, putting their arms around workers and telling them they stood behind them while they were in office while passing ordinances and trade deals that have deprived them of their livelihoods and dignity and turned their once-beloved communities into ghettos.
By Obama’s re-election in 2012, they had converted their New Deal Democrat voters into dominant groups: minorities, juvenile people, college-educated elites, and single women, all without so much as a Dear John letter.
Republicans inherited them, but most of their messaging and campaign strategists had no idea what to do with them, at least at the national level.
And then there’s the press covering the voters who will choose the next president: Few, if any, of them come from places like Weirton or Youngstown, Ohio, so they don’t understand each other’s worldview. The things that give people purpose from here, such as living close to extended family, are not as valuable to someone who has been in transition for most of their career.
In low, we are once again heading into an election in which very few people in Washington truly understand how incredibly devastating a plant shutdown is. Instead, it is, at best, a wire story that was quickly forgotten, if faced at all. They really don’t understand how much the loss of dignity in work has changed American politics. That this tone deafness still persists 14 years after Barack Obama’s 2010 midterm election and eight years after Donald Trump won the presidency is quite astonishing.
Democrats used to attract these voters, but they have moved on to the social justice crowd and don’t seem to want it anymore. I’m not sure Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., does, the press doesn’t, and the novel “very internet right” is certainly not a reflection of the center-right voter in Central America. The internet right just wants them to look like Taylor Swift conspiracy theorists. (P.S. They are not.)
Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College, said Washington elites on both sides of the aisle, media elites and now internet conspiracy elites, simply do not understand Central America, even after the last economically and politically challenging decade.
“There are few things that unite people/citizens like trying to make a living in the real world, the dignity of work and raising a family,” he explained, adding that these bonds transcend all divisions – geographical, racial/ethnic, religious, gender, ideological/party, and sometimes even socio-economic.
“If we’ve learned anything over the last decade, it’s that this bond over the difficulty of living honestly can and does create unlikely coalitions of voters,” he said. “Even diverse voters, from Bernie Sanders supporters to Trump supporters, can agree on this.”
Indeed, economic dignity and survival are strange bedfellows.
Brad Todd, founder of OnMessage and co-author with me of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, said one thing is certain about 2024: “We’re about to read a million new stories that quote zero people who actually will decide the elections.”
Brauer said the dignity of work is at the heart of the American experience: “Yet this country’s elites still don’t understand it, while average Americans are simply becoming more and more financially oppressed.”
Weld said it is the responsibility of local officials like himself to support Central America.
“I do what I do for this reason. There were empty buildings there when I was in college and high school, and it pisses me off,” he said. “I don’t think anyone fought hard enough for this not to happen. We shouldn’t have to read another story about a city dying hard and about a vacancy that no one cared about.”
