On one Thanksgiving Day, I was paid 2.5 times my rate for sleeping 8 hours in an overhead crane that never moved an inch.
I knew then that the steel industry was in big trouble.
The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Before the mills were unionized, workers were treated horribly. Seven 12-hour days were common. No days off, ever. And an injured worker was simply fired.
Fast-forward many decades. I worked for almost five years in a union steel mill. It was as you noted. The rules and quotas were so lax that it was unusual to see anyone put in a full eight hours. The mill met its quote for the shift, then everything shut down.
The workers went and hid. The plant supervisors got in their cars and went home.
Meanwhile, foreign plants were modernizing. I worked in a rolling mill. One huge piece of rolling equipment had the Kaiser’s crown stamped on it. While foreign plants were modernizing, we were using machinery bought before WW 1! That’s when I knew we were done.
Interestingly, the demise of the U.S. steel industry accelerated rapidly in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the result of one particular massive building project: the construction of the World Trade Center in NYC. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, as a quasi-public agency that operated somewhat autonomously from the two state governments, refused to pay the prices of steel that were inflated by a bidding process that was basically rigged due to the role of the federal government in pushing the unions and steel companies into uniform labor contracts.
The agency rejected the lowest bid from Bethlehem Steel (U.S. Steel was the only other bidder), and broke the project up into 15 smaller contracts. Many of those suppliers ended up using foreign-made steel, and the owner saved about 30% on the cost of the steel for the buildings.