The Steel Strike of 1959

It began on July 15, 1959, when 500,000 steel workers went on strike:

The strike occurred over management's demand that the union give up a contract clause which limited management's ability to change the number of workers assigned to a task or to introduce new work rules or machinery which would result in reduced hours or numbers of employees. The strike's effects persuaded President Dwight D. Eisenhower to invoke the back-to-work provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act. The union sued to have the Act declared unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court upheld the law.

The long-term fallout from the strike:

In the long run, the strike devastated the American steel industry. More than 85 percent of U.S. steel production had been shut down for almost four months. Hungry for steel, American industries began importing steel from foreign sources. Steel imports had been negligible prior to 1959. But during the strike, basic U.S. industries found Japanese and Korean steel to be less costly than American steel, even after accounting for importation costs. The sudden shift toward imported steel set in motion a series of events which led to the gradual decline of the American steel industry.

The steel industry was uniquely at risk for strikes.  The plants required outrageous capital investment and even the threat of a strike required the companies to prepare to shut down the blast furnaces, which would require large amounts of refitting to restart.  The companies generally tried to avoid shutting down blast furnaces at all costs.  After this strike, unions and management each made a number of decisions which led to the noncompetitiveness of the domestic steel industry until the massive downsizing of the industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which devastated Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley, Cleveland and Youngstown, among other places.  And the Rust Belt was born.