Frank Behum Sr. vividly remembers his first few days on the job as a factory worker at Bethlehem Steel. During a training session focused on “how to keep our fingers on our hands,” his instructor quietly pulled him aside.
“He said, ‘Sonny, I hope you know what you’re doing. This place is a museum. They haven’t spent money here in 50 years,'” says Behum, who worked at the mill for more than three decades before the plant ceased steelmaking operations at its main facility in the mid-1990s.
Behum is one of thousands of Pennsylvanians whose blue-collar career was peppered by upheaval and uncertainty as corporate dealings, technological innovation and international trade dynamics wreaked havoc on the regional employment landscape. With Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary elections looming large across the state, locals like him are expected to turn out in large number to support a candidate they feel can change the status quo.
Once upon a time, steel produced by Bethlehem was used in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Rockefeller Center and the Hoover Dam, among other iconic American architectural achievements.
But Behum says the fear of falling from precarious work stations, of bearing the brunt of a mechanical malfunction or of being on the wrong end of a loose beam was an everyday reality for many at the factory — not to mention the realization that workers were breathing in fumes that would affect their health years down the road.
“Most people died here from something other than being struck by something or something falling. You have to look at the environmental part of it and the stuff that you were sucking up every day while you were working,” he says, noting that respiratory disease is common among his friends and acquaintances in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania.
A monument was eventually erected in Bethlehem to honor the lives of more than 600 steelworkers who lost their lives in work-related accidents at the company’s facilities dating back to the early 1900s. Behum says former employees and their families purchased bricks around the site to commemorate the lives of the deceased workers.
“For steelworkers, it’s what you would call hallowed ground. Because, remember, this was a tight community,” he says.
Behum says this tight community — many of whom were touched by the death of a steelworker over the last several decades — felt abandoned by Bethlehem Steel, which hemorrhaged thousands of jobs over several decades before ultimately filing for bankruptcy and shutting down completely in the early 2000s.
Behum says the company failed to adequately invest in modernized equipment and employee-safety initiatives that would have benefited an otherwise “extremely talented workforce that kept the place going way in excess of what it should have been.”
But he also holds the U.S. government responsible for failing to cast a lifeline to what was at one time one of the largest industries in Pennsylvania.
“The government jerked our chain. The company was greedy. And we took the hit. It’s always the little guy that takes it,” he says, suggesting U.S. politicians have “never done a thing for the steel industry, other than cause us problems.”
Behum says European and Asian steel producers began eating up market share by selling their products at an unfair price, because it was “cheaper for them to sell their steel for less than it cost them to make it, because at least they were getting something back instead of paying social benefits to thousands of [would-be unemployed] people in their country.”
But he says he is painfully aware that Bethlehem Steel’s problems are not isolated. Across the state, from Aliquippa to Pittsburgh to Bethlehem, thousands of workers lost their jobs as steel production increasingly expanded outside the U.S.
Though global steel production more than doubled between 1980 and 2014, according to the World Steel Association, American output fell more than 13 percent. China’s output, for comparison’s sake, was 22 times larger in 2014 than it was 34 years prior.
That American production drop equated to the loss of thousands of jobs across steel-producing states like Pennsylvania. The commonwealth’s unemployment rate peaked at 12 percent in late 1982 and early 1983, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry. In industrial hubs like Pittsburgh, the unemployment rate in January 1983 eclipsed 17 percent.
And although the state’s economic health has improved demonstrably since the mid-1980s — considering the state’s unemployment rate now sits just below the national average at 4.9 percent — hard feelings over the eroded steel industry have left many blue-collar Pennsylvanians ready for a dramatic, top-down change to the U.S. government.
“These are people who feel that they’ve been left behind, that the recession hasn’t gone away, that their incomes haven’t gained,” says G. Terry Madonna, a public affairs professor and director of the college poll at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
These are the people, he says, who are tired of the establishment and are flocking to outsider candidates like GOP front-runner Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“All my buddies are voting for Bernie. We’re just praying that if he doesn’t make it, maybe he’ll be put into some sort of position where he can make a change,” Behum says. “I don’t know if he has enough power in the engine to get up to the top. … But at this stage of the game, you’re just so fed up with all the bulls–t, you’re going to vote for him anyway.”
Sanders, like Trump, has lashed out at America’s existing trade deals, which he says have contributed to the decline of American industries like steel. The Democratic hopeful said at an event in Pittsburgh earlier this month that he would “reject” membership in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and ” fundamentally rewrite” the North American Free Trade Agreement.
“I do not necessarily buy the argument that the [existing trade deals] are bad, but that they are perceived as causing unemployment is a pretty clear and emotional issue,” says Charlie Kirkwood, a candidate for one of Pennsylvania’s unbound Republican delegate positions who has heard similar trade rhetoric out of Trump. “Bethlehem Steel closed down. So it’s not surprising that people are very susceptible to the argument that that was caused by our foreign trade policy.”
Kirkwood says his father and grandfather were “machinists in Bethlehem Steel country,” so the issue hits close to home for him. But he says some of Trump’s rhetoric — bemoaning the U.S. trade gap with China and ridiculing politicians for orchestrating soft deals with international trade partners — extends beyond party lines and “ties into what Sen. Sanders is talking about with income inequality.”
“There is a conversation out there, not amongst particularly sophisticated people, that the average guy is not benefiting and that the Wall Street guys are making zillions of dollars,” he says. “You don’t need to understand economics to know that steel that used to be made in Bethlehem is not being made there anymore.”
But it was Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — ironically considered to be the establishment’s best chance of stopping Trump — who managed to both summarize the course of the 2016 presidential election while giving a shout out to his fellow senator-turned-presidential-hopeful on the left side of the aisle.
“This is the year of the outsider. I’m an outsider. Bernie Sanders is an outsider — both with the same diagnosis, but both with very different paths to heal it,” Cruz said last week. “This generation must first look inward to see who we really are after years of being beaten down.”
Indeed, some blue-collar Republicans in the state seem to identify with Sanders’ message, though they may not support his broader campaign for presidency. Ric Johnston, a maintenance worker, registered Republican and Trump supporter from Crafton, Pennsylvania, says he sees “newly generated interest” in this year’s presidential election because outsider candidates like Trump, Cruz and Sanders are more appealing to voters dissatisfied with business-as-usual in Washington.
“There is so much newly generated interest because of what Donald Trump is doing and what Bernie Sanders is doing,” he says. “The establishment is definitely getting a rude awakening.”
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Blue-Collar Pennsylvanians Turn to Outsider Candidates for Answers originally appeared on usnews.com
