PITTSBURGH (AP) — Generations of Pittsburghers have worked in steel mills, cheered on the Steelers or ridden the roller coaster at Kennywood amusement park, which offers a bird’s eye view of the massive Edgar Thomson Plant, the region’s last blast furnace.
Today, Steeltown, America’s most famous steel company, American Steelis about to be bought by a Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp. in a deal that sets off a political whirlwind in the middle of an election year in America’s industrial heartland.
The sale comes amid renewed political support for rebuilding the U.S. manufacturing sector and amid a presidential campaign in which the politically vibrant Pittsburgh region is a destination for the president Joe Bidenformer president Donald Trump and their substitutes.
The deal follows a long series of protectionist measures US Customs Tariffs Analysts say the move has helped reinvigorate the nation’s steel industry. It stirs complex feelings in a region where steel is largely a thing of the past, after people, especially those 50 and older, watched their factories shutter and their Rust Belt towns wither.
“The fear is that these jobs were gone once, and the fear is that they could be gone again,” said Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic campaign consultant whose grandfather lost his job at a steel mill 40 years ago.
U.S. Steel is no longer a major steelmaker in a Chinese-dominated industry. But its workers continue to carry political weight in what some see as a broader symbolic struggle to save what remains of U.S. manufacturing.
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With the United Steelworkers opposed to the deal, Biden — a Democrat who has been vocal in his support of labor and won the union’s endorsement — has all but vowed to block the sale of U.S. Steel, saying in a statement that the union “would not be able to sell the metal.” a rally in April with steelworkers in Pittsburgh that the company “should remain entirely American.”
Trump, a Republican who as president opposed unionization efforts but describes himself as pro-worker, said he would block the plan “instantly.”
The Biden White House has indicated that the secrecy Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States The committee will review the transaction for national security reasons. The committee can recommend to the president that a transaction be blocked, and federal law gives it that power.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is reviewing the law to ensure it complies with antitrust laws, and the steelworkers union has filed a complaint about it.
In a rare show of bipartisan unity, the sale drew opposition from Democratic Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, as well as Republican Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, on both economic and national security grounds.
Nippon Steel has scheduled the case to close later this year.
US Steel, once the world’s largest company, was the world’s 27th largest steel producer in 2023, according to figures from the World Steel Association. The company reported net income of just under $900 million on revenue of $16 billion last year.
The deal covers all of U.S. Steel’s ore mining, coking, steelmaking and steel-processing plants nationwide, including the Edgar Thomson plant, which overlooks the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh and is still producing steel plate 150 years after it was built. U.S. Steel employs 3,000 people at its four major Pennsylvania plants, including the Edgar Thomson plant and the nation’s largest coke plant in nearby Clairton.
Nippon Steel — the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker by 2023, according to the association’s figures — and U.S. Steel are now in the midst of a major public relations effort to promote the sale.
Their ads are running on social media, television screens and billboards, as the companies promise to protect jobs, move Nippon Steel’s U.S. headquarters from Houston to Pittsburgh and invest in aging Pittsburgh-area plants to make them cleaner and more efficient.
Flyers landing in mailboxes across the Pittsburgh area tout “the future of American steel” and urge residents to contact their elected officials to support the companies’ “partnership.”
And they say, “US Steel is still US Steel.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh is a city that has changed.
It is no longer a prime destination for new steel investment. The 20 miles of contiguous steel mills in downtown Pittsburgh and the Monongahela River that helped the United States industrialize and wage war are gone.
Today, Pittsburgh is considered an “education and medical” city in which universities and hospitals are the major employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, is experiencing new growth after decades of population decline. Some neighborhoods in the city have emerged from a long period of hardship and are thriving, and a younger generation is being drawn to the city’s booming high-tech industry.
Young residents or displaced people may not want steelworkers to lose their jobs, but they also care about the environment. Local elections increasingly feature rebellious progressives who frown on fossil fuels and the heavy industries that use them, such as U.S. Steel plants.
Edith Abeyta, a California transplant who lives near Edgar Thomson Works, keeps an air monitor in her home to check the air quality daily.
For her, the works of Edgar Thomson are a real horror and a threat to health.
“Not every place you go smells like rotten eggs or burning metal, and you don’t see big plumes of red or black smoke or flares burning all night,” Abeyta said. “Not everyone lives with that.”
Steel workers have changed too.
The union still supports Democrats, but rank-and-file union workers, such as steelworkers, are no longer seen as a pillar of the Democratic Party coalition, partly because of declining union membership but also because of defections to Republicans. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican to win the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Pennsylvania since 1988.
Christopher Briem, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research, estimates that there are 5,000 jobs in the region’s steel mills, a tiny percentage of the number of jobs in steel mills when steel production was at its peak. He puts the region’s peak competitiveness in the 1920s, before technological advances made the region’s metallurgical coal useless for steelmaking and gave rise to electric arc furnaces that don’t require coal.
And while Pittsburgh recovered from the steel collapse, some nearby smaller towns did not.
“And that’s what has people so concerned is the fact that we’ve been through this before and it’s changed the region and devastated people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and CEO of the Homestead-based Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation.
Tony Buba, a filmmaker who lives near the Edgar Thomson plant and whose father worked in a steel mill for 44 years, sees a misplaced nostalgia around Pittsburgh’s steel industry.
Factory work was dangerous and didn’t pay decent wages until just before the steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s, he said. “The sirens would go off when someone was hurt, and my mother would start praying,” he said.
Regardless of who owns the Pittsburgh steel mills, Buba expects them to be gone within 30 or 40 years, and political support will be short-lived.
“It will be interesting to see after the election,” Buba said, “how many people oppose the sale.”
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