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Just 14 People Make 500,000 Tons of Steel a Year in Austria (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg Businessweek feature: The Austrian village of Donawitz has been an iron-smelting center since the 1400s, when ore was dug from mines carved out of the snow-capped peaks nearby. Over the centuries, Donawitz developed into the Hapsburg Empire's steel-production hub, and by the early 1900s it was home to Europe's largest mill. With the opening of Voestalpine AG's new rolling mill this year, the industry appears secure. What's less certain are the jobs. The plant, a two-hour drive southwest of Vienna, will need just 14 employees to make 500,000 tons of robust steel wire a year -- vs. as many as 1,000 in a mill with similar capacity built in the 1960s. Inside the facility, red-hot metal snakes its way along a 700-meter (2,297-foot) production line. Yet the floors are spotless, the only noise is a gentle hum that wouldn't overwhelm a quiet conversation, and most of the time the place is deserted except for three technicians who sit high above the line, monitoring output on a bank of flatscreens. "We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
Nope. China took the jobs. List of countries by steel production. China produces five times as much steel as the EU, and ten times as much as America.
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc. It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
It's OK because Donald Trump will retrain the steel workers so they can get a job at Blockbuster Video.
Why didn't they just employ thousands of people that just work for a few minutes a day? Oh yeah, reality kicked in. -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"We have to forget steel as a core employer," says Wolfgang Eder, Voestalpine's chief executive officer for the past 13 years. "In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated."
Tell me something I don't know like, for example, how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated. Will we have a situation like in ancient Rome where the rich people who owned masses of slaves they used to bankrupt small businesses and farmers by undercutting them with cheap labour but then ended up feeding the unemployed citizen masses simply out of a deep rooted and very real fear of the unwashed citizen masses rising up, dragging the moneyed classes out of their luxury villas and either throwing them to the lions or just crucifying them in the atrium of their own luxury villa? Will our unemployed kids and grand kids be living off of handouts from the rich oligarchs who own the automated factories? ... and how will an economy work when only 10% or less of the population are employed either designing new robots or staring at flatscreen making sure that things are running smoothly?
Far more than fourteen people will be employed maintaining the machines. The industries necessary to produce the robots, including semiconductors, software, materials, lubricants, etc, need employees.
It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need.
Let THEM deal with the pollution, costs, etc?
If a steel plant can't be built and operated in the US as they are in China, then no one in the US should be buying steel from China.
What is considered inhuman working conditions here are inhuman working conditions there. What is considering environmentally damaging here is environmentally damaging there. Etc. Etc.
Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I know people that used to work in steel mills years ago. You don't want those jobs! They are horribly dangerous!
One of the stories involved two coworkers walking on a catwalk above the blast furnace in full heat suits (think Jamie's suit from Mythbusters). One of the workers leaned on the railing and it let go. He was vaporized before he hit the surface of the steel.
The stories like this go on and on. People crushed between rail cars, etc. Sure, the steel industry paid really well, because it had to. The working conditions were so terrible, no one would work there otherwise.
This kind of extreme work environment is ideal for automation. I'd rather see a robot get destroyed in an accident than a person killed.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
They are making steel wire. Operating one machine.
All those people need to be paid, and that cost is passed along the supply chain.
So there can't be that many of them or there'd be no cost saving in automation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
What is considered inhuman working conditions here are inhuman working conditions there. What is considering environmentally damaging here is environmentally damaging there... Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
Are you suggesting that the minimum wage should be set globally? That we demand comparable benefits packages for employees of every international entity we do business? If you're holding your breath until the working conditions in the Philippines match those in the U.S., you'll wind up far past blue in the face.
Steel is a really bad money-losing business to be in. An automated steel mill may seem clean, but you also need coal mines, coke kilns, limestone quarries, etc.
You could use Pepsi kilns instead of coke kilns. In blind taste tests 2 out of 3 diabetics preferred steel made using pepsi kilns.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
There is only one thing to do to give some hope the wretched masses yearning to breath free.
Make it legal for people to sell any surplus organs they might have. The lazy bums don't need both the left eye and the right eye. Right?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Look at the pay rates for developers in India today. The days of price arbitrage are rapidly shrinking, and look at their population. It's all about gaining experience and then turning from cost cutting labour import to local work.
In fact, when labor costs increase, just automate. Look at what's happening in China.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I wouldn't have thought that there was even one person who made 500,000 tons of steel?!?
If it's dangerous and/or boring, it's better to have a machine do it.
Machines are getting better at a lot of things. My first time through college, I got a decent amount of PLC training, but those units are now entirely obsolete. Machine vision was a thing back then, but you needed a highly-specialized $6,000 ISA card just to grab frames and analyze them. Now, you can do it with a potato-grade webcam and a Raspberry Pi.
I went back to school to get updated on as much as possible since I want to do maintenance now that Electronics and PC Repair have both taken a massive shit with everything moving toward being disposable. The maintenance guys I've met are all retiring and companies are aching to hire young blood. On top of that, industrial control boards still use through-hole components for durability reasons and I can repair that stuff in my sleep.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
That's an interesting question, but not the central one here, looking at the big picture.
People in the West fret about machines taking their jobs...but it's not people in the West who are going to be most affected. Yes, there will be people who will be stuck "in between" - their jobs will be automated away, but they will be too old / not adept enough to retrain for a new job (or simply, no one will want to hire them even if they do, for whatever reason). Western countries are however rich enough to take care of those people - yes, relatively speaking, for them it will suck, going from a job to being on the dole until retirement, but this will be a small % of the population.
It's all the aspiring immigrants from poorer countries that will be screwed. Countries like Austria have been importing labour for the blue-collar jobs since the 1950s. Even as the post-war economic boom slowed down, they needed to continue due to dwindling fertility levels (avg. EU TFR 1.58 births/woman - below replacement). If these jobs are automated, it won't be the locals missing out - it will be the prospective immigrants. Western countries might just severely restrict immigration (and accept only small numbers of highly qualified individuals).
This is a problem, not directly for the West, but for the Third World. When the West "poaches" highly qualified people (engineers, scientists, doctors) from the Third World, this is usually great for the West and for those individuals, but terrible for the Third World (which is loosing its most qualified people, of whom it almost always has a shortage and pays a relative fortune to train). Remittances are the only way the Third World profits in that case, usually. However when the West takes in unqualified manual labourers, it's often a win-win-win situation: the West fills jobs it cannot fill with its local population; the immigrants get a higher standard of living; and the Third World replaces often unemployable people who are a social/political problem with money-sending expats. Those who remain there can even, in some cases, benefit from the reduction of the labour pool as wages go up.
Not to mention outsourcing, which is "immigrantless immigration" or "job emigration" - Western countries send over the jobs instead of bringing in people. So what happens when demand for such imported labour in the West disappears? What happens when Western multinationals realize it's cheaper to produce locally in automated 20-people factories than somewhere far away (where labour is cheap but from where transportation costs may be high)? Some (many?) Third World countries may become pressure cookers (some already are - they will get worse) of unemployed and underemployed people. What happens when tons of would-be immigrants come to borders of Western countries, and those countries turn them away since they the only thing they would do with 90% of them is put them on welfare? Now THAT'S going to be the problem, not unemployment in some town in Austria.
An old steel mill might have had 1000 people per shift but I doubt it.
"In the long run we will lose most of the classic blue-collar workers, people doing the hot and dirty jobs in coking plants or around the blast furnaces. This will all be automated." This was the primary goal of "The Future," remember? Making life easier, and having the hardest, most dangerous jobs done by robots... Remember the various worker droids in Star Wars? Rosie the Robot Maid? The Stepford Wives? (Well, maybe not the Stepford Wives.)
We need to fight for those 14 jobs! We need companies like these! We should give them like 14 million dollars in tax breaks per year so we can have 14 jobs that pay 75K per year. Bring jobs back! Or we can do something reasonable and start planning on a very generous Universal Basic Income.
Only I can judge you.
Now where can I get myself some assembling machine threes...
>"It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need."
No, we need to retain enough capacity to be able to fight a war with the major producers, even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war. We should limit our imports to non-essential quantities of steel.
The 14 people work in a plant that makes *steel wire*.
The steel itself is made in a plant next door.
The 14 people work in the wire mill, making wire from steel, not making steel. The article says there are 300 more workers doing support, and that may only be support of the wire mill, not the blast furnace that actually makes the iron and the converter that makes the steel from the iron.
>"It is better to let someone else make it, and just buy what we need."
No, we need to retain enough capacity to be able to fight a war with the major producers, even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war. We should limit our imports to non-essential quantities of steel.
It won't help.
Last time I heard, all the LCD panels were made in China. So guess what happens to the supply of monitor display screens for our advanced weapons systems?
At least we can still get microprocessors from Mexico and Malaysia.
How about forget anything that used to require massive labor
Let others wage war, you - habby Austria - marry!
even if it is a trade war instead of a shooting war.
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
60% of steel produced in America is recycled from scrap, not forged.
If international trade in steel stops, that will hurt China far more than it will hurt the US.
The point is that previously a rolling mill to make 500,000 tonnes of steel wire a year would have required a lot more people to operate it and keep it running, maybe as many as a thousand people. Today it only takes a handful due to automation.
This is nothing really new, of course. In the 1970s in Britain the iron and steel industry was operating with old equipment with men shovelling oresands into open-hearth furnaces built in the 1920s while in places like Malaysia modern steel plants were being run by operators in airconditioned control rooms. In the end the old plants in Britain were shut down and 90% of the employees were laid off.
And China will automatize just as well, only a bit later.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just because it's "over there" doesn't mean that working conditions and environmental impacts are magically made acceptable
Well, apparently it does mean that, because both parties has been fine with it for decades.
And the only person of consequence to take real issue with it is currently the favorite whipping boy of both parties.
so long as those differences involve us getting cheap consumer goods.
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The Rich don't need you to buy their crap when they already own everything. Take a look at Apple, who became the most profitable company in human history by selling low volume, high margin items to the upper class (save for the occasional poor person trying to keep up with joneses).
Face it, the Rich don't need you or me. They'll claim ownership of everything and we'll give it to them because we can't bear the thought of somebody having food they didn't work all day for while we toil all day in the few jobs that are left. That's how it was for literately thousands of years of recorded history. What makes you think it won't go back to that?
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No, but it's easy enough to add taxes to make up for environmentally damaging and inhumane practices. Should that tax be high enough, demand will fall for these practices, because there's no benefit to engaging in them.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Even the article says the plant takes ingot from the foundry NEXT DOOR
Add that to the equation and you will get a shit load more people working there
Incredibly misleading headline.
They are not making steel.
They are rolling steel already delivered in billet form into rod and wire.
The thing is called a "mini-mill" and I saw one running some time around 1989 with around twenty people total running the site.
It depends on if you want to be in the integrated steel business or the minimill business. If you have blast furnaces that makes you an integrated producer producing steel from Iron ore, A minimill typically uses scrap steel and melts it in an electric furnace and continuously casts it. The US today makes 68% of its steel from scrap. (A lot of scrap is generated in manufacturing) So if you are running a mini mill you don't need a coal mine, coke, limestone or iron ore, just scrap and electricity. )
That's what people who negotiate free trade deals don't seem to understand. Tarrifs are in place to protect the relative differences in cost of production due to local quality of life. A free trade deal is basically just saying: We think this is too dangerous and we don't want people working in this industry here, let's kill some foreigners.
LOL at their use of the word "people", when we all know it's MEN who make ALL of the steel in the world, not women...
Still, a nice try at pretending this isn't actually the case by using the word "people"...
Cool.
And how much more money do they make?
Listen, for most of human history, 99.9% of people lived a subsistence life. Why should now be any different?
That is not how trade wars work. In a trade war, countries cut export prices, while raising tariffs to keep imports out. In a trade war, you can still buy whatever you need, you just can't sell what you have.
Unless you no longer manufacture what you need, and only manufacture what other countries want...
Not even close. OP is suggesting better working conditions, not pay.
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
" like in ancient Rome where the rich people who owned masses of slaves they used to bankrupt small businesses...."
??? History check? I call BS on this. What proof do you have that this was a widespread problem? Can some historian weigh in on this ? Seems you have some ideologized vision of Rome. Also contrary to popular belief horses were very rarely senators.
You mean the same guy that banks on the sweatshops for his businesses? ROFL. The only difference between that goon and the others is that goon will lie to your face, get caught and you will still cheer him because he does what you want to do. Let's face it, you want to be able to say whatever racist shit you think, lie your ass off and still sit around making millions. You forgot, though you weren't born to wealth like old orange head. Rules and laws apply to you. Get over it or help change it.
not HaPsburg!
Read the quote I posted. They don't count the people running the furnace. That's considered a separate facility.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Well, yes.
The world needs steel. There is a market for steel. Moralizing doesn't make steel. Ore, energy, chemical feedstock, and factories make steel. The have fresh land, resources, labor, and a willingness to make it. We can make it in the US, but it's more expensive.
Pollution isn't permanent. I can be cleaned up. The Chinese can also benefit from more than a century of experience and avoid the worst pollution horrors of the west's industrial revolution.
It's paternalistic and racist to assume Chinese are being exploited and used. Don't forget that not long ago most Chinese were subsistence farmers. It's an awful miserable life where you do nothing but work until you die just for food to eat. Where bad weather means you just die earlier from starvation.
We buy steel. They get elevated out of abject poverty. Everyone wins.
Except steel just happens to be a prime strategic material. THE prime strategic material. At some point you might want to take your head out of your model and consider things from a wider and varied perspective.
"Hey China, we wanna make a carrier and some subs to counter what you're doing in the South China Sea." Wanna sell us some?
Incidentally, China does not do all the mining either. We sell coal and ore to China so they can make the steel. That's a traditional empire/colony relationship. So being at an aggressive adversary's mercy for a strategic material while participating in an emperor and the slave boy relationship does not seem a good plan for future economic and political success.
But you have your opinion.
Another thing that free trade people don't (or pretend not to) understand is that the theory behind free trade only works if the people who make the import product get the money. If the people who make the product inexpensively are paid super low wages, and we pay a low price but much higher than what they get - while some importer's board of investors suck out lots of money in labor arbitrage, then the benefit that's supposed to accrue to the people who make the product inexpensively and cause them to improve their quality of life & want higher wages never gets to them, and the "free" market system fails.
Anyone who doesn't hunt or gather is technologically unemployed. Inventions like agriculture, animal husbandry, sanitary sewers, paved roads, carpentry, cloth created new jobs that didn't exist for our paleolithic ancestors.
Over the millennia, the specific technologies that have thrown people out of work, generation after generation, have changed. But the process has not.
The big change in the last couple of centuries is that people live long enough to see their occupations go away, or change so dramatically they're far from the same thing, because they pace of change has picked up. Old age took care of those made redundant by the horse-collar. Dockworkers, not so much.
My dentist isn't doing the same things now as when he started, decades ago. (I for one am glad of it.)
And nobody unloads cargo ships by hand into boxcars, or boxcars into trucks. (And I'm glad of that, too.)
So, they're making steel the way Lays makes potato chips. This is a bad thing? I guess it is, if you're a professional slag wrangler or potato peeler, and you can't or won't learn how to do anything else that is more in demand.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Pollution can be cleaned up? We aren't talking about picking up litter here. Coal plants spread Mercury and other toxins over a content and kill thousands. In many cases pollutants in the ground water permanently ruin aquifers. Companies which saved thousands of dollars by dumping waste have caused millions of dollars in Superfund sites. In some of cases even after spending the money the "clean" site is merely clean because it is capped with clean fill dirt. The toxins are still burried there. If pollution is no big deal because it can be cleaned up, then it should be even less of a big deal to not make it in the first place.
Minimum wage in Australia is $17.70 per hour plus a loading if It's casual work.
The theory behind free trade is that it increases wealth for all economies involved. It says nothing about who gets what.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It did when I read it.