Black Monday 77'

Black Monday is the name given to the mass lay-off that happened that day, at the “Youngstown Sheet and Tube Factory”. On this day, 5000 people were let go by the company. This episode shocked the whole “Steel Valley” and was the first event in a succession of companies closing or getting bought out. For Youngstown, Black Monday was tragic. Nearly half of the population went away. Black Monday was just the beginning of it, before a wave of unemployment in the whole state of Ohio.


This is for me a way to show the more let-down part of the United States of America, bringing a closer point of view on a bigger problem that we call the “Rust Belt” phenomenon. Bringing it to a more human scale helped to understand the incomes and the outcomes of the “Steel Valley”. How much the lack of employment and social service could impact a community like that?

The testimony part of my work was even a step closer. How such an industrial and economical event could affect the lives of people inside their households. I focused my project on two workers now retired, but mostly on John Julien Fusco.
John lived his whole life in Youngstown. He wasn’t let down for Black Monday but saw the whole transformation of the region during this period. Like every social issue, there’s a matter of scale. It is always a good reminder that every policy, and every economic issue, affects the daily lives of the communities taking part in it.