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Why Are Presidential Candidates Talking about Coal and Steel in Pittsburgh — and Not Uber and Google?
Pittsburgh, PA.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Donald Trump’s campaign stop in Pittsburgh where the presumptive GOP nominee vowed to bring back Pittsburgh’s once-thriving steel and coal industries. (Democrats also seem wistful for decades past when inequality was lower and union membership higher.)
As I mentioned, the promise seemed a bit anachronistic. Politico thought so, too:
Pittsburgh is now a leader in the emerging robotics industry, which Trump did not mention on Wednesday. Google opened a major research office in the city in 2006, housed in a former Nabisco factory. And Uber, the ride-sharing company, last year poached dozens of robotics engineers from Carnegie Mellon University to open a center to research self-driving cars. In February, Uber announced it is acquiring a former locomotive roundhouse along the Monongahela River — where the LTV Coke Works long ago belched out the kind of toxic smoke that once earned the city the description “hell with the lid off” — to serve as a proving ground for its new vehicles.
And the region’s largest employer is now the behemoth UPMC health system — not struggling US Steel, which announced on April 6 it is cutting a quarter of its North American workforce. Trump’s Pittsburgh rally also came the day that Peabody Energy, the largest private coal company in the world, declared bankruptcy, buffeted by competition from natural gas and cratering demand for coal in Asia.
Now comes word that Uber will be test-driving autonomous cars in Pittsburgh. From Uber’s blog:
If you’re driving around Pittsburgh in the coming weeks you might see a strange sight: a car that looks like it should be driven by a superhero. But this is no movie prop — it’s a test car from Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center (ATC) in Pittsburgh. The car, a hybrid Ford Fusion, will be collecting mapping data as well as testing its self-driving capabilities. When it’s in self-driving mode, a trained driver will be in the driver’s seat monitoring operations. The Uber ATC car comes outfitted with a variety of sensors including radars, laser scanners, and high resolution cameras to map details of the environment.
The economic challenge of today is a) making sure our economy is a dynamic, job-creating one, and b) making sure we are preparing workers of today and tomorrow for those jobs. Economic nostalgia for a time that’s not coming back is unhelpful and actually harmful.
Published in Culture, Economics
Pittsburgh has wisely used its educational institutions (the University of Pittsburgh, I’m an alum so a bit biased, and Carnegie-Mellon University) as the foundation of its phoenix-like rise out of the literal ashes of steel, coke, and coal.
I lived there for seven years in the 2000’s and was able to see the giant begin to get off the ground. It is a wonderful place to live now and it is a place folks looking for a nice home would be smart to consider.
The reason that candidates are talking coal and steel is that Pittsburgh is gaining higher tech jobs and losing blue collar jobs. The presidential candidates are addressing blue collar voters who probably don’t have the talent or inclination to go into those tech jobs.
But they could also address tech workers concerns too, by talking about ending H1B visas.
I went to Carnegie (no dash) Mellon right after the Robotics Institute was founded and agree that Pittsburgh is a great city and that it’s fantastic to see the ‘Burgh rebuild itself as a leader in medicine and technology.
The pic below is from the Sparrows Point MD steel mill in 1966 which is the same year I toured the plant on a high school field trip–the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Bethlehem Steel did not modernize in time and the plant died a slow death, sold five times in 10 years, lots of false hope and unrealizable promises before it closed for good. Politicians promised a jobs revival right up to the end.
I lived in DC but my best man and college chum grew up in Baltimore. His father worked every horrible job on the docks at Sparrows Point and in elsewhere in the shipyards in Baltimore Harbor and was proud of doing what others shunned.
The neighborhoods from the plant into downtown were tightly drawn and clannish. Not a yuppie for miles (except me, I guess.). I loved dining in Little Italy when it was more authentic and I was guided by locals as to which bars would be amendable and which routes to them were safe.
Even if some enlightened politician had a forward-looking brilliant plan, the sheer social and cultural inertia of old industrial Baltimore probably would have resisted even beneficial changes.
Maybe we should start thinking about how we will need to transition out of the internet/services/high tech economy when it too becomes obsolete, a habit of Plan B policy-making that we have never been good at doing.
James,
Pittsburghers are used to this intellectual disconnect. The actual Steel Industry began moving west in 1910 (I think an anti-trust suit was involved). First to Gary Indiana and then out to California. However, the old mills kept running long after that. Pittsburgh became fixed in the minds eye as the Steel City and politicians look for photo ops ever since.
Not only is the high-tech present and future of Pittsburgh really where it’s at but even her colorful old colonial past is ignored.
Ever get the feeling we might be in for another Allegheny Uprising.
Regards,
Jim
I’ve lived in the Pittsburgh region since 1991, and have raised my children here. I’ve never gotten the sense that there is a lot of nostalgia for the steel industry as it used to be. It should be noted that the Marcellus Shale has led to a fracking boom in the area. (Some people do complain that too much of that industry employs transplants from Texas, and is not sufficiently open to working with local labor and businesses.)
Anyway, Pittsburgh is an interesting city with great civic “bones” (symphony, museums, universities) left by previous generations. Today, more of the young are sticking around to put new meat on those bones.
You don’t get a lot of union leader support when you talk about robotics instead of the evil bosses who eliminated good paying union jobs.
Why Are Presidential Candidates Talking about Coal and Steel in Pittsburgh — and Not Uber and Google?
I should think it is because, in Trump’s case at least, the other examples that you cite–robotics, Google, Carnegie Mellon, Uber, UPMC, etc, etc–are those of a country that’s moving forward, keeping up, adapting, succeeding and prospering.
That’s not the kind of country Donald Trump would like us to believe we live in today. His campaign is based on appeals to those who think they have been disenfranchised and left behind, some probably by the sorts of companies and enterprises mentioned above.
I’m not sure how much of what Trump says about bringing back coal and steel Trump’s supporters actually believe, and how many of them believe it. But when he’s not talking about that, he’s talking about forcing companies to bring offshore jobs back (as with the iPhone) so that they can be made here. It sounds crazy to me, but I guess we’ll see.
His message, which is much more appealing to some than “pick yourself up, dust yourself off, (retrain, get a new job in a new field), and start all over again,” is resonating with a substantial segment of the electorate. Manly jobs for manly men. (I suspect that there are many who secretly believe that Real Men Don’t Work For Google.)
For many, Making America Great Again goes through getting their old jobs back, no matter how many years it’s been since they had them. Because America, and in this case Pittsburgh, hasn’t been Great since the mills/mines/factories closed, and almost all the Fortune 500 companies moved their headquarters somewhere else.
There are a fair number of folk around here* who determinedly believe this, no matter how many new jobs, new industries, new services, or new employers move into the area. (@Cazzy is right in #6 that fracking has made some difference, but it’s very susceptible of political and environmental changes. Several months ago, a lot of people were laid off (gas prices down, the new governor’s not a fan), but now it’s picking up again. It’s not seen as a lifetime job that’s passed down from generation to generation, as the old ones were. And there do seem to be a lot of transients in what would have been called ‘blue-collar’ jobs, with young, college-educated types interfacing with the public, working as engineers, and testing for the EPA. Fracking is all around us, and we have contact with one or another company or agency on an almost weekly basis).
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*I’ve lived within 35 miles of downtown Pittsburgh for more than 50 years.
I lived in Pittsburgh for 50 years. I have been gone for 21. I lived the demise of the steel industry. I spent the last week back home as a tourist and visiting family. Believe me steel is never coming back. Where mills once where there are condos and movie theaters and white collar office buildings. At it’s peak steel had 300,000 jobs in the area. It’s down to around 2100. China has excess capacity in their industry equal to four times the entire consumption of steel in America. US Steel Corp.lost 1.4 billion last year. 350 million in the first quarter of this year.
To answer your question about politicians, the answer is stupidly ,stupidly on the part politicians, stupidity on the part of those who listen to them.
Service industry jobs. The vast benefits of a service economy have included ballooning debt, rampant drug abuse, racial sectarianism, ethnic sectarianism, mass unemployment, the breakdown of the nuclear family, the breakdown of the community, and the total collapse of self-sufficiency.
But we do have the gentle distractions of the Internet and cheap, robot-flipped hamburgers in exchange. I guess we’ll have to add country-wide porn-addiction to that list above.
The Trumpster is economically illiterate. What you’re pushing here is not economic illiteracy. It’s just flat out insanity. Give me the protectionism if my only other choice is a fading, technocratic wasteland with a growing class of morally bankrupt elites who offer us bread and circuses in lieu of a culture.
Thankfully, there is a third way. I think Trump sees it. I hope he does. Or if not him, maybe Ryan, or some other Republican.