The interruption of the closure, in this instance, by the frame: "LTV [Steel] was able to use its bankruptcy to reduce payments to productive workers." In the old days when the city bus used to pull up to the factory gate, the driver would call out "butcher shop" or "slaughterhouse". In negotiations with the steelworkers union, LTV extracted more takebacks than other, presumably healthier steel companies were able to." I can remember sitting around the lunch table and everybody at that table, there must have been seven or eight people, had a finger or something missing. "This gave LTV an advantage over its competitors." Believe it or not, people felt it was kind of like a badge of honor that they had a finger or something mising, and that would be a topic of conversations.** "Bankruptcy became, through a cultural process that understood bankruptcy as failure, a condition for success."

Forty years of hard work and what have I got to show for it? Nothing. [...] I can't even speak proper. Working-class kids writing their names on a wall that is bound to erase them. When you're a steelworker (laughs), you don't get to speak the same language that you would do if you meet people in a bank or business office. [...]

History, the arrow
pointing past
[inside this frame]--

interest at 2.9% for What
we can't afford in the first place

Every day you put your life on the line when you went into that iron house. Every day you sucked up dirt and took a chance on breaking our legs or breaking your back. And anyone who's worked in there knows what I'm talking about.

"He said his father can't survive on an $8- or $9-an-hour job. He takes home about $900 every two weeks and Lisa works part-time at Festival Foods in Virginia ... He ruptured a disk after a huge pipe rolled back on him last year in the mine. He endures surges of back pain that can make normal movements excruciating. Doctors expect them to get worse and more frequent as he gets older."