This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is not subject to our Creative Commons license. When Amazon opened its second fulfillment center in the Baltimore region, in 2018, most anyone driving to it from the city arrived via Dundalk Avenue, which took them past a yellow brick building that was constructed in 1952 to house Local 2609 and 2610 of the United Steelworkers and an adjacent building that opened after Local 2610 moved into its own space. By then, the buildings were mostly vacant, because the steel mill whose workers the union had represented had closed, in 2012, after a long, steady decline. The Bethlehem Steel works were once the largest in the world, an industrial sprawl on the Sparrows Point peninsula that employed some 30,000 people, several thousand of whom lived in an adjoining company town. The work had been grueling and frequently treacherous since the mill’s founding, in the 1890s: “Always More Production” was the slogan of Eugene Grace, Bethlehem Steel’s president from 1916 to 1945. And, in the early decades of the 20th century, a disproportionate share of the fruits of the workers’ labor flowed to the top: Grace’s predecessor split his time between a mansion on Riverside Drive, in New York, which with 75 rooms and a dining salon that could seat 250 was the largest residence in the city, and a 1,000-acre, 18-building estate in Pennsylvania, which required a staff of 70 and included a replica of a farming village in Normandy.