7,500 steelworkers bought their own mill with an 8-to-1 vote — it still went bankrupt

On 2 March 1982 National Steel issued an ultimatum to the workers at its Weirton, West Virginia division: buy the ageing mill and run it yourselves, or it would shut down gradually. The workforce had already fallen from 11,000 in 1980 to 7,500. The parties reached agreement on 16 March 1983, and on 23 September the members of the Independent Steelworkers Union voted eight-to-one to become the owners.

The price was paid largely out of the workers' own pockets. Weirton acquired $386 million of assets with $74.7 million in cash financed from a $120 million credit line, plus promissory notes worth $119 million; compensation was cut 32 per cent — a 20 per cent wage cut in return for ESOP stock worth up to $90,000 per worker — and 400 management jobs were eliminated. To satisfy the twelve banks underwriting the buyout, the workers waited until 1988 for full control of the board.

For a while the bet worked: operating income reached $86 million in 1984 and more than $144 million in 1987, and the company stayed profitable into the mid-1990s. Then cheap imported steel landed, and under growing financial pressure Weirton declared bankruptcy in 2003 and was purchased by International Steel Group, later part of Mittal. James B. Lieber's book on the buyout is called Friendly Takeover: How an Employee Buyout Saved a Steel Town; nineteen years after the vote, the mill the workers had bought was no longer theirs.