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."

Comments

Terrible Jobs

[Thelasko]

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.

Re:Terrible Jobs

[jimminy_cricket]

My father in law worked at the local rail yard. One evening one of the employees was accidentally caught between the couplers as two rail cars were being coupled. His lower torso was completely smashed and compressed in the couplers. Because his lungs and heart were above the couplers, he continued living as the compression of the coupled cars kept him from bleeding out. They called his family and they came over to say their goodbyes. Then they uncoupled the cars and he died. Awful.

Re:So what happened to all the employers?

[c0l0]

I grew up in Trofaiach, the town next to Donawitz (less than 10km from the steel plant). My grandfather worked there as an electrician from the 1950s to the 1990s. While I did visit the local Erzberg musem (there's an ore mining operation ~30km north of Donawitz in a town called Eisenerz where they have the kind of museums and parks you'd expect a site with such a rich history to have) during my childhood, I can't really remember what it was supposed to be like during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy - but the latest developments in the are are not very pretty.

Both Leoben (the city that Donawitz is a part of) and Eisenerz shed a MASSIVE amount of population - in the 1970s, Eisenerz was at ~15k inhabitants, while these days, I think it's less than 7k. Leoben fell from 42k people to ~18k or so. Since the steel industry has been privatized in the 1980s, thousands of jobs have been cut, while corporate profits soared - so whoever is still there and still has a job is pretty well off still. All in all, however, the whole Bundesland (federal state) of Steiermark/Styria (this is where Arnold is from :)), is pretty much perceived to be in a downward spiral since then, due to market forces at work - industry is lot cheaper to do elsewhere, and you can only compete so much on superior quality of product alone.

Re:So what happened to all the employers?

[mspohr]

I believe the headline says "Just 14 people make 500,000 tons of steel...".
This is wrong. These people are not making steel. They take steel that somebody else has made and turn it into wire.
They are making wire, not steel.