In the sitting room of his tidy Marske home Matty Lodge wrestles with the problems confronting him.

Working at Corus he has plenty of them. He only needs another four years to qualify for an early pension, but the state of the company doesn't offer much encouragement.

The share price is counted in pennies, and it is stricken with internal rowing between English and Dutch management.

The former British Steel is also looking for lines of credit while struggling with debts of up to £1.5bn. No wonder then that Matty's wife, Dorothy, wrings her hands and looks at her husband somewhat anxiously.

If the company decides to close a big site - and Teesside is the favourite candidate with the loss of 3,000 jobs - then their lives will, as the clichZ has it, be turned upside down, and a catastrophe will have visited itself on the Lodges.

Twenty-eight years in the steel industry have brought Matty and Dorothy a comfortable life, a fantastic little home with the odd extravagance such as the full-size snooker table in the dining room, an electric scooter for the children and a plan to run Matty's model railway all the way around the garden.

But it's not that these small lives, replicated all over Teesside, will be thrown into turmoil if Corus decides to close plants that is so significant.

More significant is what such a decision would signal: the end of any notion of paternalism in the steel industry.

In the 1980s chairman of British Steel Sir Ian McGregor started the rationalisation of the industry by announcing that he wanted so few people working in his plants that his desire was to be able to fire a gun across any of them and the bullet wouldn't hit anyone.

But steel slimmed itself down mainly through natural wastage, not big plant closures, and if you remained in the industry then you could reasonably expect to have a job for as long as you wanted. The same was true at ICI.

And both the chemical company and British Steel's influence reached far beyond the world of work.

There were ICI and British Steel outings, sports days, galas, clubs, choirs, Christmas hampers and reviews stuffed full of in-house jokes at the expense of management.

And at the end of it all there was a big generous pension awaiting you. It was perhaps a stultifying life, but it was a life in which the company appeared to have a real interest in the social needs as well as the work needs of its employees.

A big plant closure at Corus will show how far we've come from those days and kill off any idea that the company cares for anything other than its shareholders and guaranteeing its continued existence at any price.

- lan Reeve is Business Correspondent, BBC TV North East & Cumbria.

Published: 25/03/2003