PITTSBURGH (AP) — Generations of Pittsburghers have worked in steel mills, rooted for the Steelers or ridden roller coasters at Kennywood amusement park, giving them a bird’s-eye view of the massive Edgar Thomson Works, the region’s last furnace. .
Now, the most popular steel company in Steeltown USA, US Steel, is on the verge of being acquired by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp. in a deal that is kicking off an election-year political whirlwind in America’s industrial heartland.
The sale comes amid a wave of renewed political support for rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector and amid a presidential campaign in which the politically dynamic Pittsburgh region is a destination for President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and their surrogates. .
The deal follows a long stretch of US protectionist tariffs that analysts say have helped revive domestic steel. And it’s stirring complicated feelings in a region where steel is largely a thing of the past as people, especially those 50 and older, saw mills close and their Rust Belt towns dry up.
“The fear is that these jobs went away once, and the fear is that these jobs could go away again,” said Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic campaign consultant whose grandfather lost his steel mill job 40 years ago. seen.
US Steel is no longer a major steel producer in an industry dominated by the Chinese. But its workers still carry political weight in what some see as a larger symbolic fight to save what’s left of manufacturing in the United States.
With the United Steelworkers opposed to the deal, Biden — a Democrat who has made clear his support for organized labor and won union support — has vowed to block the sale of US Steel, telling an April rally of steelworkers in Pittsburgh that the company “Must remain all-American.”
Trump, a Republican who as president opposed union organizing efforts but describes himself as pro-labor, has said he would block it “immediately.”
The Biden White House has indicated that the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will review the transaction for national security concerns. The committee can recommend that the president block a transaction, and federal law gives the president that power.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is reviewing it for antitrust compliance, and the steelworkers’ union has filed a complaint against it.
In a rare burst of bipartisan unity, the sale has drawn opposition from Democratic Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and from Republican Sens. JD Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, on grounds economic and national security.
Nippon Steel has scheduled the deal to close later this year.
Once the world’s largest corporation, US Steel was the world’s 27th largest steel producer in 2023, according to figures from the World Steel Association. It reported just under $900 million in net income on $16 billion in sales last year.
The deal includes all of US Steel’s ore mining, coking, manufacturing and steel processing plants across the country, including the Edgar Thomson Works, which towers over the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh and is still churning out steel plates 150 years after it was built. US Steel employs 3,000 people at its four main plants in Pennsylvania, including Edgar Thomson and the nation’s largest coking plant in nearby Clairton.
Nippon Steel – the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker in 2023, according to the association’s figures – and US Steel are now in the midst of a broad public relations effort to promote the sale.
Their ads are on social media, TV screens and billboards as the companies promise to protect jobs, move Nippon Steel’s U.S. headquarters to Pittsburgh from Houston and invest in aging Pittsburgh-area plants to made them cleaner and more efficient.
Flyers landing in Pittsburgh-area mailboxes tout “the future of American steel” and urge residents to contact their elected officials to support the companies’ “partnership.”
And, they say, “US steel remains US steel.”
Meanwhile, Pittsburgh is a changed place.
It is no longer a destination for new steel investment. Gone are the 20 or so miles (32 kilometers) of back-to-back iron and steel mills from downtown Pittsburgh and up the Monongahela River that helped the US industrialize and wage war.
Now, Pittsburgh is seen as an “eds and doctors” city in which universities and hospitals are the main employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, is just starting to grow again, after decades of population decline. Some neighborhoods of the city have emerged from a long period of war and are thriving, and a new generation is attracted to the city’s growing high-tech industry.
New residents or transplants don’t necessarily want steelworkers to lose their jobs, but they also care about the environment. Local elections are increasingly galvanizing insurgent progressives who take a dim view of fossil fuels and the heavy industries — such as US Steel mills — that use them.
Edith Abeyta, an artist and California transplant who lives near the Edgar Thomson Works, keeps an air monitor in her home to check air quality daily.
To him, Edgar Thomson Works is a massive eyesore and a health threat.
“Not every place you go smells like rotten eggs or burning metal or you see big plumes of red smoke or black smoke or flames burning all night,” Abeyta said. “Not everyone lives with that.”
Even the steel workers have changed.
The union still supports the Democrats, but union members, such as the steelworkers, are no longer seen as the bedrock of the Democratic Party coalition, partly because of the shrinking number of unions, but also because there have been 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, estimated there are 5,000 steel mill jobs in the region, a small percentage of the number of mill jobs when steel production was at its peak. . It places the competitive peak of steelmaking in the region in the 1920s, before technological advances made the region’s metallurgical coal unnecessary for steelmaking and created electric arc furnaces that did not require coal.
And while Pittsburgh has recovered from the steel collapse, some smaller neighboring cities have not.
“And that’s what got people so upset, is the fact that we’ve been through this before and it changed the region and destroyed people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and chief executive of the Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation, based at Homestead.
Toni Buba, a filmmaker who lives near the Edgar Thomson plant and whose father worked 44 years in a steel mill, sees a misplaced nostalgia about Pittsburgh’s steel industry.
Mill jobs were dangerous jobs that didn’t pay well until just before the steel collapse in the early 1980s, he said. “The sirens would go off when someone got hurt and the mother would start praying,” he said.
Regardless of who owns them, Buba expects that Pittsburgh’s steel mills will be gone in 30 or 40 years — and that political support will be swift.
“It will be interesting to see after the election,” said Buba, “how many people are against the sale.”
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Follow Marc Levy at twitter.com/timelywriter.
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