part of history on Continental can company

This is a part history of the continental can company. Part of our Soar group are retirees of this corporation.

Major plant in north St. louis and most of the workers were steelworkers (USWA)

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http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/lehman/chrono.html?company=continental_can_co_inc

■1945 Continental Can Company, Inc.: 150,000 shares of $3.75 cumulative preferred stock
■1951 Continental Can Company, Inc.: 104,533 shares $4.25 cumulative second preferred stock (without par value) $15,000,000 3 1/4% debentures due October 15,1976
■1960 Continental Can Company, Inc.: $30,000,000 4 5/8% debentures due October 1, 1985
■1970 Continental Can Company, Inc.: $60,000,000 principal amount 8 1/2% sinking fund debentures due August 1, 1990
■1974 Continental Can Company, Inc.: 8.85% sinking fund debentures due May 15, 2004
The Continental Can Company was founded by T.G. Cranwell in 1904, three years after the formation of its greatest rival, American Can Company. Continental acquired the patents of United Machinery Company, one of the few companies producing can-making machinery that had not been bought by American Can. Continental began shipping cans in 1905.

The company bought the Standard Tin Plate Company in 1909 to ensure that they would have a steady supply of tin. Continental's original business consisted only of packers' cans for fruits and vegetables. Given the seasonal nature of this work, the company decided to expand to general canning in 1912. By 1913 the company had acquired all of the interests of a New Jersey corporation also called Continental Can Co., as well as the Export & Domestic Can Co. and the Standard Tin Plate Co. The same year, Continental was incorporated in the state of New York.

During the 1920s Continental expanded rapidly, purchasing almost twenty competing companies. It opened its first West Coast plant in 1926. In 1928 Continental acquired the third-largest can company in the country, the United States Can Company. By 1934 Continental and its rival, American Can, were producing approximately two-thirds of the 10 million cans made annually in the country. At this time, the company was operating thirty-eight plants in the United States and Cuba. Continental suffered a drop in its income during the Depression; even so, by 1932 the company had never reported a money-losing year.

Continental bounced back from the Depression years, and by 1940 its operating revenue had increased to $120.7 million from $80.9 million in 1935. In 1940 the company built plants in Canada as well. Continental continued to expand during the following decade through acquisitions, and the company entered the fields of paper and fiber containers, bottle caps, and synthetic resins. By the end of the 1940s, the company had sixty-five plants, including eight plants producing fiber and paper containers, four plants producing crown caps, and one plant producing plastics. By 1954 the company's gross sales reached $616 million, and its net income was approximately $21 million. At that time, Continental was operating eighty-one plants.

During the company's first fifty years of existence, it had purchased and absorbed twenty-eight independent can companies, as well as other concerns producing fiber drums, paper containers, and bottle tops. In 1956 Continental acquired Hazel-Atlas Glass Co., the third-largest U.S. manufacturer of glass containers. Continental then became the first company with a full line of containers in metal, paper, and glass. It also purchased Cochrane Foil Company, a manufacturer and distributor of aluminum plates and rigid foil packages for the frozen-food industry and other food suppliers. The company also bought Robert Gair Company, a leading producer of paperboard products, that same year. Due to such acquisitions, Continental briefly surpassed American Can's annual sales, topping $1 billion in 1957. By 1960 the company operated 155 plant facilities.

The introduction of the easy-to-open metal can top in 1963 led to an increase in the use of metal cans rather than glass bottles for beverages. By the end of 1966 over 45 percent of U.S. beer and over 15 percent of U.S. soft drinks were packaged in metal cans. That same year Continental introduced the first commercially practical welded can. In 1969 the company acquired Schmalbach-Lubeca-Werke A.G., the largest packaging producer in the European community. By that time, Continental had 228 manufacturing plants.

By 1973 the metal can industry was in a crisis due to oversupply and tough competition. Both Continental and American Can were said to have made the wrong decisions in the previous decade by adding capacity for both tin plate and tin-free steel production while the aluminum can was gaining popularity. Another problem was growing public opposition to throwaway cans. Continental's profits from domestic can-making dropped from $115 million in 1969 to $52 million in 1973. The company then closed many old-style integrated manufacturing plants in favor of large automated metal-processing centers and separate can-assembly operations situated near its customers' plants. In 1973 the company developed a system for the ultraviolet curing of inks and coatings on metal plate, and installed a number of such systems.

1877 Grand Army of Starvation labor history

The following is part of labor history. Cut into three parts, it deals with topics "not" covered in history being offered to students in Missouri and I suspect elsewhere.

Film is not in the best condition, but will help fill some of the labor history gaps that some folks have. Most folks do not realize that workers in the United States have always been disadvantaged. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzol0ms895k

Note: I had kin working on the railroads during this era. I had some working coal mines as well.
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Fun Al Gore ad about green

This is an ad that is fun. Al Gore does the magic on recycling and ecology:

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More stimulus news: good for offshore folks

the following is from the steelworker blog. Appearently the stimulus is working: offshore.

I like the idea of "green energy", however if folks abroad are going to do most of the profiting; I will have to rethink. By the way, both India and China have moved large amounts of cash into wind power. Smart idea
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http://blog.usw.org/2009/11/19/hell-if-d-c-didn%e2%80%99t-offshore-849-million-in-stimulus-for-windmills-already/
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Hell if D.C. Didn’t Offshore $849 Million in Stimulus for Windmills Already
Posted November 19, 2009 at 11:22 am, in From the President


By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

It turns out a Texas windmill farm developer’s request last month for nearly half a billion in stimulus funds to create 2,000 jobs in China doesn’t rank first on the audacity scale.

Shockingly for American taxpayers, and sadly for the staggering 10.2 percent of Americans who are unemployed, it doesn’t even rank second.

That’s because Washington already has doled out hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to foreign renewable energy firms. Of the $1.05 billion in clean energy grants awarded by D.C., $849 million — 84 percent — went to foreign wind companies, according to an analysis by Russ Choma of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He wrote:

“The cash grants were given for the installation of 1,763 megawatts of capacity – 1,566 installed by foreign companies. Using the Renewable Energy Policy Project’s own numbers, as many as 4,500 manufacturing jobs may have been created overseas.”

A strong, broad Buy American clause in the stimulus bill could have prevented the off-shoring of U.S. tax dollars intended to create jobs for unemployed Americans. My union, the United Steelworkers, and the AFL-CIO pushed hard for that language, and polls showed 86 percent of Americans supported it. Republicans and lobbyists for multi-national corporations that wanted to spend U.S. tax money overseas opposed Buy American provisions.

Congress adopted weak, limited Buy American language. Now D.C. exports stimulus dollars to create jobs in foreign countries.

Some of the foreign wind firms that got stimulus funds have American subsidiaries. But most of them shipped major components for wind farms to the U.S. That means American stimulus dollars employed foreign workers. One Spanish company, Iberdrola S.A., got $545 million from U.S. taxpayers.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat from New York, denounced the request to use U.S. tax dollars to create jobs in China and demanded the Obama administration deny funding. But it’s too late for the $849 million in stimulus dollars already given away to foreign wind companies. American tax dollars, meant to create jobs and nurture a green energy industry in the U.S., are gone with the wind.

Lavishing stimulus funds on foreign businesses is tragic for another reason: Those overseas companies are competitors to fledgling U.S. firms that were supposed to get the money. President Obama has said he wants the U.S. to be “the world’s leading exporter of renewable energy.” That’s not going to happen if the U.S. pays European and Chinese manufacturers to import wind turbines.

Congress set aside at least $3 billion in the stimulus bill for renewable energy projects. That investment would have two benefits. Growth in renewable energy – from sources such as windmills and solar cells – could reduce dangerous pollution from burning fossil fuels. In addition, the Blue Green Alliance estimated in its report, “Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line,” that U.S. manufacturers could create 850,000 jobs if Congress adopted a national standard requiring 25 percent of electricity to be generated with renewable sources by 2025.

The key, obviously, is that the wind turbines and solar cells constructed to meet that standard couldn’t be imported for the jobs to be created in the U.S. The U.S. industry, however, needs the kind of help foreign governments give their clean energy manufacturers. The Blue Green Alliance report notes:

“Without new policies promoting domestic manufacturing, an unnecessarily large portion of these jobs will remain overseas.”

Keith Bradsher of the New York Times in a July 13 story described China’s policy to protect and promote its renewable energy industries: “China is shielding its clean energy sector while it grows to a point where it can take on the world.” That includes, Bradsher recounted, a competition last spring where China disqualified all foreign bidders on technicalities for 25 contracts to supply wind turbines. Beijing then awarded the contracts to seven Chinese companies, including some that had never built a turbine.

There’s no reason except a desire to shoot itself in the foot for the U.S. not to protect and promote its own renewable energy industries. “The Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line” report provides recommendations for Congress to cultivate American renewable energy industries, including long-term investment tax credits, adopting a national standard requiring a minimum percentage of electricity be generated through renewable energy, passing cap and trade legislation, and providing low-interest financing.

After the Texas windmill incident, I wrote Sen. Schumer asking for bold action to support U.S. clean energy manufacturing. In the letter copied to all members of Congress, I told him we must expand and accelerate the availability of incentives for manufacturing wind turbines and other clean energy technologies – here, in the U.S. One important way to do that is for Congress to extend to the manufacture of components like turbines the funding incentives that are now provided for production of clean energy.

Clearly, another method would be to Buy American. When constructing a wind farm in Texas, why would taxpayers give their money to support importing the turbines from China or Spain when there are perfectly good turbine manufacturers here in the U.S.?

The Texas windmill farm developer announced this week that its Chinese partner plans to construct a $50 million turbine factory in the U.S., according to a story in the New York Times. But that facility won’t supply the turbines for the project that the partnership wants $436 million in stimulus funds to support. Those would come from China. So, in the end, it still means nearly half a billion in U.S. tax dollars would create 2,000 turbine-building jobs in China.

When China passed its $600 billion economic stimulus bill this summer, it adopted “Buy China” provisions. Obviously, as far as wind turbines were concerned, it was implementing a “Buy China” policy before that.

Is the U.S. going to continue thwarting itself and tilting at windmills or is it going to adopt and enforce a robust Buy American policy and build some?

senate new healthcare bill

Although this bill is likely to change again, this is a link for folks wishing it.

Over 2000 pages and the index alone is 14 pages:

http://democrats.senate.gov/reform/patient-protection-affordable-care-act.pdf


Although I have not read any but the highlights, I might point out that many things are not in this bill. Single-payer is not there nor is some other things.

Public option is greater than house version, but still lame in my opinion.

Learn to Speak Tea bag new Fiore cartoon

This is the latest treat from Mark Fiore. Wonder what Mark is doing in 2010?

I know what a few dems are doing in 2011, awaiting unemployment if they do not grow some semblance of a spine in congress.

I find it amazing that the teabaggers have sent so many dems into hiding when the dems won big in 04. That spineless act in the face of Bush made me ill, but to continue this when they have won big; that is gutlessness to the extreme.

By the way, my recommendation to the Soar members in Sam's Missouri district: Get rid of his conservi-dem behind next election day. If he is a republican, let him declare that and vote with his buddies evermore.

healthcare bill HR3962 voting and passage

Morning folks.

As you know, the healthcare bill HR3962 is not single-payer nor is it universal. We have discussed bits and pieces of this bill at our meetings.

This is the voting on the lame bill in districts we have Soar 11-3 members:

Missouri Il
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Clay: yes Costello: yes
Carnahan: yes Shimkus: no
Akin: no
Emerson: no
Luetmeyer: no
Ike Skelton: no (democrat)

------for the most part: dem: yes, repubs: no-----------------

This bill barely passed with 220 for and 215 against. One republican did vote for the bill by the way and about two score traitor dems voted against. Where are the fearless leaders cracking the whip in congress? Where is number one and who knows the Obama plan? If you do, please contact for it looks pretty leaderless at this point and time.

In Missouri, folks voting against this lame bill will most likely not get an endorsement from SOAR 11-3 and hopefully none will get AFL-CIO support in upcoming 2010 election.

Note: since the senate has yet to pass a bill and the bills combined, look for furture eroding of healthcare for the nation.

Note two: I still have a healache from watching the "soap opera" unfold Saturday on C-Span. I also feel like throwing-up as I read some of the "victory" statements on healthcare. WE WON NO VICTORY. Ask those going to die shortly for they lack access to quality health insurance (over 100 each day by the way).

New Bill of Rights

I have discussed with folks what is needed for the American people is a "new bill" of rights. This was a concept that FDR had in 1944 and some of the Obama folks picked up on the idea.

If "Healthcare is a Right", our leaders are going about promoting that right in the wrong direction.

This might be of interest to some, click the link to the story. Note, in those nations that have universal healthcare; the average citizens of those nations are closer to these rights than most Americans. Forget that nonsense of "Blame America first, for in some cases it is true that other lands have it better in some areas than most Americans.:

Barack Obama and "The Second Bill of Rights"
What is the "Second Bill of Rights?" The idea, that seems to be forming as part of the Barack Obama Agenda of redistributing wealth, was first articulated by none other than President Franklin Roosevelt during his 1944 State of the Union Address.
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