Tradepoint Atlantic gives new hope for the ‘Point’
December 08, 2016
The Daily Record
by Joe Nathanson
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“When I arrived in Baltimore in 1970, the largest single private employer in the region was Bethlehem Steel, with its 30,000 workers busy at the various stages of steel production at Sparrows Point. The “Point,” as it was fondly known, had a glorious history, having supplied the girders for construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, the cables for the George Washington Bridge and essential components for armaments in both World Wars.
The 1970s were marked by cycles of occasional increased demand for the local steel production followed by periods of cooling off. During those production lulls, the workers who would be laid off, many of them residents of Dundalk, Essex and Middle River as well as Baltimore city, would wait patiently until they would eventually be recalled to their unionized jobs.
But not all would be recalled. With those successive cycles of ups and downs for steel production, the ranks of the steelworkers were declining…”