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The former most valuable corporation in the world sold to a Japanese company for basically chump change. (Hint to any lurking butthurt libs: don’t, for the love of heaven, look up statistics on Chinese steel manufacturing).
Check out US steel’s stock price. Usually it jumps up when a company is being bought out. This is to reflect the price the buying is willing to pay for the stock, which is usually at a good premium.
None of this will go to the workers. This is not a win.
Regarding Chinese steel manufacturing, last I calculated, the average steel maker in China makes 3-5 times more steel than the average steel maker in the US, while working the same hours.
I don’t think anyone sees it as win, but it’s extremely funny considering the context of US crippling Japanese economy for decades and their grandiose economic resurrection plans (which are necessarily based on steel production like in all previous cases in history of industrial economy).
Exactly, it’s not a “win” for American workers, except perhaps in the limited sense that Japanese management is maybe a bit less likely to run the company into the ground. But it is a symptom of America’s terminal decline as an industrial power.
Also, US Steel is a merger of several companies founded by the 19th century “robber baron” industrialists, who are still held up as more-or-less flawed heroes in the US. If it weren’t for the effect on workers, one might feel a certain schadenfreude at this turn of events.