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Comment by Supermancho | Hacker News Reader

> Those “integrated” steelmakers soon lagged behind so-called “mini-mills,” nonunion competitors that use more efficient electric arc furnaces to turn old steel scrap from discarded cars and other products into new steel products

This means "chinese" mini mills^1 which require a lot of manual labor to collect the steel. This is not a technology problem, but a manpower/safety race to the bottom, that the US couldn't effectively participate in. Unions may have prevented useful compromises, granted.

New technology was not a priority, because it wouldn't help the situation. It's not like steel makers stopped doing cost/benefit analyses for decades.

A Japanese owner looks like a strategic political move, given Japan's place in the world theater. The tariffs against steel were removed for the US and Japan at the same time circa 2022. Coincidence?

^1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-steel-overcapacity-...

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The Reuters article is just a history of Chinese steel production. It doesn't support anything you said. According to the CNN article, Nucor, an American non-unionized American company, is successfully utilizing mini-mills.

> One pioneer of this mini-mill technology, Charlotte-based Nucor has a market capitalization of $42.5 billion compared to US Steel’s value of just over $14 billion as set by this deal.

> Nucor is also the largest steelmaker in America by output, making an estimated 20.6 million metric tons of steel per year, ranking 16th largest in the world. That compares to 14.49 million metric tons from US Steel, including its operations in Europe, which rank 27th in the world for 2022, according to the World Steel Association.

>> It doesn't support anything you said

> What China could not achieve by Stalinist state planning or Maoist revolutionary enthusiasm, it achieved by letting a million private-sector smelters bloom.

Good luck with whatever.

Smelting typically refers to extracting metal from ore.

Most chinese workers (and foreigners working in China) are in a union, however run by the communist party.

These are differently structured and run than unions outside of China. There's little recourse for protest and negotiation through them.

Oh I know. But it’s technically called a union, at least. They also funnel the morale budget through it for some strange reason, so the free movie tickets now come from the Union rather than just your employer as before.

Of what value is a union in China? I have seen some of the most deplorable safety tandards that don't even dream of OSHA-tier compliance.

The value of a union in China is profit for the owner of the company and control of worker organization. Going outside the ACFTU worker organization is illegal and punishable.

Ahh so still a holdover from the Soviet system, in a way?

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