When Steel Goes Silent

On March 25, 2025, Cleveland-Cliffs announced it would idle portions of its Dearborn Works plant in Michigan. Six hundred steelworkers received notices. By July 15, the blast furnace would go cold. The basic oxygen furnace would stop its roar. The continuous casting facilities—machines that had run for decades—would fall silent.

The same week, 630 iron ore miners in Minnesota learned their fate. The Minorca Mine in Virginia would shut down completely. Operations at Hibbing Taconite would slow to a crawl. The company cited “weak automotive production” and the need to “consume excess pellet inventory produced in 2024.”

Bobby Atanasovski, one of the Dearborn workers, told a local reporter what the layoff meant: “I gotta start over again, and I got five to 10 more years of work, it’s a blow.” Melanie Johnson, another laid-off worker, described the practical terror more plainly: “I don’t have a partner to help me with the bills, with the rent, my mortgage, the car payment, food, health insurance. What happens in six months when I don’t have any of that?”

The company’s statement was clinical. The actions would allow Cleveland-Cliffs to “operate more efficiently and in a more cost-competitive way for the current market environment.” Efficiency. Cost competitiveness. Market environment. Clean words for what happens when 1,230 people walk out of a plant for the last time.

These aren’t numbers. They’re neighbors. Parents. People who showed up before dawn, packed their lunches, clocked in, and believed the work would last.

Nearly ninety years ago, John Steinbeck watched families being pushed off their land by banks and tractors and economic forces they couldn’t name or fight. He wrote what he saw in The Grapes of Wrath, and one passage still cuts:

“A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company—that’s the bank when it has land—wants tractors, not families on the land.”

Steinbeck understood something essential about economic displacement: it doesn’t happen because someone is cruel. It happens because systems—banks, corporations, markets—operate by their own logic, a logic that has no room for the people it grinds up. The bank isn’t a person. It’s a machine. And machines don’t weep.

He wrote about tenant farmers who built lives on soil they never owned. Who believed if they worked hard enough, the land would stay theirs. Who discovered too late that the math had changed, and they no longer figured into the equation.

The Joads in Steinbeck’s novel weren’t lazy. They weren’t failures. They were people caught in forces larger than themselves—dust, debt, and an economy that had decided it could run more efficiently without them.

Sound familiar?

This is why writers matter.

Not because they can stop a plant from closing or reverse a corporate decision. But because they can make us see what we’d rather ignore. They can put names and faces to the numbers. They can remind us that “restructuring” means Bobby starting over at 55. That “operational efficiency” means Melanie lying awake at 3 a.m., doing math she knows won’t work out.

In The Power of Authors, we wrote: “Writers have always understood their job wasn’t to chase applause but to plant seeds. To write not just for their moment but for moments they’d never see. To trust their vision when others didn’t understand it, and to keep faith with readers who hadn’t been born yet.”

Steinbeck planted those seeds in 1939. His words still grow.

And the question for today’s writers is this: What are you planting?

When you see a story like Cleveland-Cliffs—when you see 1,230 families facing an uncertain future while executives talk about margins and market conditions—what will you do with it?

Will you scroll past? Will you shake your head and move on? Or will you do what Steinbeck did—bear witness? Write it down. Make people see it. Tell the truth in a way that lands.

You don’t need a bestseller to matter. You need a backbone. You need to care enough about Bobby and Melanie and the 630 miners in Minnesota to say their names. To tell their story. To refuse to let them become just another line in a quarterly earnings report.

The steel has gone silent in Dearborn. But your voice doesn’t have to.

Write what you see. Write what’s true. Write so someone, somewhere, remembers that behind every statistic, a person is packing up their locker for the last time.

That’s the power of authors.

Stories like these remind us how words shape lives—how they steady us, stir us, and spark change. The Power of Authors, by Evan and Lois Swensen, carries this conviction to its core. More than a manual on writing, it is a meditation on purpose, showing how every word—whether in a novel, a thank-you note, or a simple message—can echo far beyond its moment. Copies are available through Amazon (link), Barnes & Noble, and everywhere good books are sold. For an autographed copy, visit this link.

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