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Chapter 6 “It Was like a death— to the Town” In the nineteen years from 1963 to 1982, America saw the closing of a hundred thousand manufacturing plants, resulting in about twenty-two million lost jobs. Like newspaper accounts of mass famines or war refugees, such statistics are so overwhelming as to be numbing. Lost, too, in the cumulative statistics is something of what such plant closings represented in individual communities. Of course, each closing was unique, and each occurred as the culmination of a thousand different decisions and calculations by a great many people. Individual workers had to repeatedly ask and answer for themselves a whole series of questions. Is my job safe or not? Will I survive the next round of cuts? At what point do I begin looking for another job? How rooted am I here? How rooted is my family? And how far away are we prepared to move to land another position? Midlevel managers had to sift through a variety of interrelated questions concerning what and when to tell their employees about the uncertain future of their jobs.1 Even senior corporate executives, from their more removed levels, found themselves gingerly entering a new field of corporate management for which few of their elite MBA programs had adequately prepared them. Certainly these executives were shielded by several layers of intermediaries from experiencing the full financial and emotional impact of the economic body blows that their corporations were delivering to individual cities. Yet the reverberations from such decisions still quivered far up the corporate hierarchies. All across the country, business executives were receiving informal, postgraduate crash courses in managing industrial decline. The experience had become so common that innovative new midwestern MBA programs would have been well advised to expand their course offerings; clearly, budding corporate executives 143 144 RUST BelT ReSISTAnCe needed to learn how to deftly manage relations with partner communities they were abandoning. As for BP, whatever else its decision did or did not accomplish , its experience in Lima at least prepared the company to offer special insights into such emerging subfields of business administration. By the time BP’s divestiture of the Lima refinery was accomplished, such BP executives as Atton, Percy, and even John Browne must also have been singularly equipped to share with other corporate heads pointers on specific elements of the process, for example: Here’s how you replace the lost product. Here’s how you massage local public opinion. This is how much it will cost you to regain public favor. And here’s how you handle troublesome mayors. In fact, as they recalibrated their corporate machinery to close Lima down, BP executives were being well trained to lecture at length on how to deal with a recalcitrant community that was doing its best to throw sand into the gears of the entire operation. “Black Tuesday” The minute that Atton and Paisley assumed management of the Lima refinery sale they must have noted the challenges of their new assignment. They knew the plant had problems. For one thing, BP had long designed Lima to run in concert with its sister refinery in Toledo. As a stand-alone plant, stripped of the subsidiary processes performed in Toledo, like desulphurization and alkylation, Lima was less valuable. Moreover, it ran on expensive feedstock. Both Lima and Toledo had been processors of “sweet” crude. While sweet crude had some advantages —it had less sulfur than “sour” crude and thus could produce a higher proportion of more valuable products like gasoline and jet fuel—its relative scarcity globally meant that it had a higher cost per barrel. When BP’s executives decided to sell Lima, they also invested $235 million in the Toledo plant to enable it to refine the dirtier but more abundant—and therefore cheaper—sour crude. By itself, Lima had some structural problems that the new sales team could not get past no matter how they spun the story.2 On the other hand, hype or not, the Maumee Mission still left Atton with a number of impressive sales points that he did not hesitate to tick off to potential buyers. In a company newsletter that April, for example, he labeled the Lima plant a sophisticated refinery, proclaiming that it was “in the top quartile in products yields and costs.” By the end of the summer, not only were significant regional oil companies like Ashland and Marathon showing signs of real interest but a bid suddenly emerged from within BP...

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