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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?
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".
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
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
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.
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 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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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.