The steel mill was won. That was the easy part.
In the weeks after ThyssenKrupp chose north Mobile County for a multibillion-dollar carbon and stainless steel complex, the mood among the people who had chased the project was not simple triumph. It was something closer to vertigo, and the reason was labor.
“The juggernaut must turn”
One executive deeply involved in the region’s economic development effort put the problem in terms that admitted no comfort.
Before ThyssenKrupp, he said, the Mobile area already had a serious shortage of qualified workers. With the mill coming, that shortage had become critical, and it would remain critical even if the region never landed the Air Force aerial refueling tanker contract that Mobile was then chasing with equal intensity.
The conclusion he drew was a repudiation of the past twenty years of local strategy: “The economic development juggernaut must turn from recruiting industry to recruiting and training workers.”
His summary of the moment was less genteel, and more memorable, than anything a chamber of commerce would print. Momentum, he observed, cuts both ways.
A city about to be rearranged
A Mobile real estate attorney offered a forecast that extended past the mill gates. Between the steel plant and the new container terminal at the state docks, he argued, Mobile was going to change tremendously over the next five years, and so was the practice of law in it.
He expected the larger Birmingham firms, and possibly firms from outside Alabama, to arrive and buy or merge with small and medium-sized Mobile practices. They had watched what Mercedes-Benz did for Tuscaloosa and what Hyundai did for Montgomery, and they intended to be positioned when the same thing happened on the coast.
His central point deserves underlining, because it was the argument local boosters made repeatedly in that period: the spin-off growth from the container facility and the steel mill would exceed the direct employment numbers, possibly by a wide margin. The mill’s own payroll was never the whole prize.
The plane that could have gone to Baton Rouge
One detail from the announcement itself circulated among people close to the process, and it captured how narrowly the region’s fortunes had turned.
On the morning of the decision, ThyssenKrupp officials were waiting in Jackson, Mississippi, with flight plans filed for two destinations: Montgomery and Baton Rouge. They were awaiting word from Dusseldorf as to which way the plane would fly. Alabama and Louisiana had both bid aggressively, and the company’s executives on the ground did not know the answer until headquarters told them.
When the word came back that it was Alabama, according to a source familiar with the process, the team on the plane broke into applause.
Ham hocks and quality of life
A government executive who spent time with the visiting German contingent reported that the delegation’s interest in the region was not confined to port access and electricity rates. They were, he said, entirely taken with the food and the quality of life. Beyond the obvious appeal of Gulf seafood, they had developed a serious appreciation for Southern cooking, and at least one member of the group could prepare a ham hock that would hold its own anywhere in the South.
The detail sounds trivial. It was not. Site selection decisions of that magnitude turn partly on whether executives believe they and their families can live somewhere, and the Mobile delegation understood that it was selling a place as much as a set of incentives.
What came after
The complex was built at Calvert, and it opened. It also proved a punishing investment for ThyssenKrupp, which ultimately sold the carbon steel operation to a partnership of ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel and the stainless operation to Outokumpu. The plant at Calvert remains one of the largest industrial employers in the region.
The workforce warning sounded in the spring of 2007 also proved durable. The shift from recruiting plants to producing skilled workers became the central preoccupation of economic development along the coast, and it has never stopped being one.