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USW joins USX in protesting imports
Tuesday, October 20, 1998 By Jim McKay, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
U.S. Steel's management and its mill workers in the Mon Valley don't always see eye to eye, but yesterday they showed that they can act together when both feel threatened.
An estimated 2,500 to 3,000 union members in work clothes mixed with the suit-and-tie crowd from corporate headquarters on a lawn outside the United Steelworkers hall in West Mifflin. They were there to protest a record amount of imported steel being sold in this country at low prices.
"This import crisis is like a dagger aimed at the backs of the 4,200 people who work at our Mon Valley Works and Clairton Works," Paul J. Wilhelm, president of the USX Corp.'s U.S. Steel Group, said from a stainless steel podium.
Andrew "Lefty" Palm, director of the union's Pennsylvania district, called for a grassroots letter-writing campaign to persuade the Clinton administration to act. "Together we need to save our industry. We are at a crossroads. We are right at the edge of a cliff," Palm said.
Cheap imports from Russia, Japan and other countries have forced prices for commodity grade steel down by $50 a ton, or 16 percent, according to "Stand Up For Steel," a joint corporate and union campaign that sponsored the rally.
A dozen steelmakers and the United Steelworkers union are asking for immediate federal help in trade complaints filed against Japan, Russia and Brazil. They allege in the complaints, filed on Sept. 30, that those countries are dumping, or selling steel in the United States for 28 percent to 199 percent less than production costs or home-market prices.
Leon Lynch, vice president of the United Steelworkers union, said imports threaten to repeat the mill towns devastation of the 1980s. "Everything destructive happens when you lose a steel mill, when you lose a steel town," he said.
Lynch said steel imports, if they continue at the rate seen in July, would eat up 45 percent of the U.S. market. Imports of sheet and coiled plate steel from economically-troubled Russia, for example, have jumped from 810,000 tons two years ago to 1.9 million tons last year. The number through July was nearly 1.8 million tons.
Russian sheet steel is selling this week for $220 per ton or less, down from an average $294 per ton in the final months of 1997 and about $250 per ton in July, Wilhelm told the crowd.
"We know what it costs to produce and deliver a ton of steel and ship it across the sea," he said. "And it isn't 220 bucks. Nothing like it!"
Wilhelm scoffed at critics who say cheap imports are good for consumers. He said smuggling is good for consumers, too. "Whether it's smuggling or dumping, it's illegal and it must be stopped," he said.
U.S. Steel claims its orders and shipments at the Mon Valley Works, which includes the Edgar Thomson plant in Braddock and the Irvin Works in West Mifflin, suddenly dropped by about 20 percent. Those two plants employ 2,500 people. The company's Clairton Works, which produces coke used in the steelmaking process, employs about 1,700.
The company indefinitely idled a blast furnace at its Gary Works in Indiana and laid off about 100 workers in its Pittsburgh-area facilities. Don Thomas , president of the USW local at Edgar Thomson, said more layoffs are scheduled to occur next week in the Mon Valley. "The economy is supposed to be booming," he said.
Wilhelm estimated that as many as 100,000 steelworkers could be put out of work if the trend continues. The domestic industry employed an average 162,000 people through July, according to the American Iron and Steel Institute.
Walt Lonce, president of USW Local 2227 at Irvin, compared the current import threat to the industry's crisis in the 1980s when hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost in the U.S. steel industry.
"We've already had layoffs and if we don't see results, a lot more will be affected and a lot more will come," he said.
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