Steel making from iron ore is a silly thing to be doing in the UK. We no longer have supplies of Iron Ore and there is sufficient diversity of steel supply from elsewhere. So why is there a difference between importing steel and importing the ore? UK steel works should be about recycling steel that is already here – and it should be near fully automated.
The engineering the steel workers should be doing is constructing automated housing production lines – creating energy efficient houses that can be simply bolted together on site.
What I find annoying about the ‘save the steel’ campaign is that there wasn’t a ‘save the wool spinning’ campaign when all the spinners shut down due to competition from Turkey. Is that because it was a female/immigrant industry?
UPDATE: Bill Mitchell has a blog on the structure of jobs in the steel industry here. It makes for interesting reading.
UPDATE: Bill Mitchell has a blog on the structure of jobs in the steel industry here. It makes for interesting reading.
