New Youngstown, Ohio Steel Mill Being Built,

And Guess Who’s Building It

Youngstown, Ohio was once the heart of the nation’s steel industry, but after its biggest plant closed in the 1970’s it has been pretty much down hill for the city.  Now a company plans to invest $650 million to build a new, like brand new, steel making facility in the city.

On the edge of the Mahoning River, where once stood dozens of blast furnaces, more than 400 workers are constructing what long has been considered unthinkable: a new $650 million steel plant.

When complete, it will stand 10 stories tall, occupy one million square feet and make a half million tons of seamless steel tubes used in "fracking" or drilling for natural gas in shale basins



Then



Two things stand out in this story.  The first is that the plant will add 350 jobs to the area, which is great, but the numbers mean it takes $1.7 million of investment to create one manufacturing job. 

Youngstown has lost 20,000 jobs in the last five years, so to replace all of those in a steel plant would take an investment of about $35 billion.  So don’t expect the resurgence of manufacturing the cure Youngstown’s, or the economy’s manufacturing employment difficulties.

•  

And Now

The second part of the story is that the plant is being built by a French company, France's Vallourec & Mannesmann Holdings Inc.,.  Yes those are the same French who refused to join the U.S. in Iraq, the same French that Conservatives were so mad at that they started calling their favorite side dish “Freedom Fries”. 

No one expects “Freedom Fries” to be on any menu in Youngstown, and The Dismal Political Economist thinks maybe someone ought to go back and look at the French position at the start of the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  Maybe they were on to something.

Say merci beaucoup, Youngstown