Paige and Ed, Sun City Center

Diane Johnson, Paige and Ed's Longview neighbor for more than twenty years, sent this photo to me. It was the last one she received from Paige before Ed's death on Thanksgiving Sunday. They were happy, comfortable, well, and safe in their frugal Sun City Center bungalow for the short time they were there together, about thee years at the start of this century. Ed had all his retirement in Social Security benefits and his Bethlehem Steel pension. He left Bessie Steel in 1977; twenty-five years later, Bethlehem Steel was bankrupt and gone, along with most of his pension.

I recall seeing correspondence between Ed and the United Mine Workers union leadership. Ed's dad, Italo, worked in the mines north of Pittsburgh. An injury forced him out of the tunnels and into a surface job. That also meant a lower pension, apparently for a lower risk job. My sense is that whatever anti-union bias Ed might have had as a Bethlehem supervisor was forged from his experience with the union that did not take good care of Italo. Reading the approximately 100 year history of Bethlehem Steel, the basic lesson I learned was the old adage, "management gets the kind of union it deserves." Both sides wanted to maximize their benefits, even if a real imbalance would eventually kill the company. I recall a stat from my graduate days that from 1968 to 1978, steel worker productivity did not improve, while real wages claimed over 100 percent. Cheap labor and steel from abroad soon led to the demise of "big steel," who could not or would not compete.