The Real Path to Industrial Renewal

For decades, Washington has tried to cushion the blow of globalization with job training and relocation subsidies. It hasn’t worked.

In 1978, a reporter found John Koruschak, a laid-off steelworker from Campbell, Ohio, returning home from California, where he’d searched in vain for work. After 25 years at a mill that once employed more than 4,000, Koruschak had received a gold watch—and then a pink slip. He scraped by on unemployment checks but couldn’t find work in the glutted local market. At 58, he realized that he needed retraining to switch industries. But available programs often steered workers toward ill-suited or low-paying jobs far from home. “I’d move,” he said, “if I can talk my wife into it.”

Koruschak didn’t know it, but he was among the first victims of a wave of plant closings that would sweep through the region, wiping out tens of thousands of industrial jobs. Some workers and families left in search of better prospects; others stayed and relied on government assistance, often for years, with little success even after retraining. By the late 1980s, as many as four in ten former steelworkers in the greater Youngstown area remained unemployed. Several attempts to restart the Campbell mill collapsed.

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