PITTSBURGH (AP) — Generations of Pittsburghers have worked in steel mills, cheered on the Steelers or ridden roller coasters at Kennywood amusement park, where they got a bird’s eye view of the massive Edgar Thomson Works, the region’s last blast furnace.
Now US Steel, the most prestigious steel company in the USA, is about to be taken over by the Japanese steel manufacturer Nippon Steel Corp. The company will now be in the headlines in a deal that is causing political turmoil throughout the industrial stronghold of the USA in an election year.
The sale comes amid a wave of up-to-date political support for rebuilding America’s manufacturing sector and in the midst of a presidential campaign in which the politically active Pittsburgh region is a target for President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and their surrogates.
The deal follows a long series of protectionist U.S. tariffs that analysts say have helped revive the domestic steel industry. And it is generating mixed feelings in a region where steel is largely a thing of the past after people, especially those over 50, watched steel mills close and their Rust Belt towns wither.
“The fear is that these jobs have been lost before, and the fear is that they could be lost again,” says Mike Mikus, a Democratic campaign consultant from Pittsburgh whose grandfather lost his job at the steel mill 40 years ago.
US Steel is no longer a major steel producer in an industry dominated by the Chinese, but the company’s workers still carry political weight in what some see as a symbolic fight to save what’s left of US manufacturing.
With the United Steelworkers union opposed to the deal, Biden – a Democrat who has made clear his support for unions and won the union’s backing – has virtually vowed to block the sale of U.S. Steel. At a rally with steelworkers in Pittsburgh in April, he said the company should “remain American through and through.”
Trump, a Republican who opposed union organizing efforts as president but describes himself as pro-worker, has said he will block them “immediately.”
Biden’s White House has indicated that the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will review the transaction on national security grounds. The committee can recommend that the president block a transaction, and federal law gives the president that authority.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is reviewing the law’s compliance with antitrust law and the steelworkers’ union has filed a complaint against it.
In a scarce display of bipartisan unity, the sale faced opposition from Democratic Senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, as well as Republican Senators JD Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, on economic and national security grounds.
Nippon Steel plans to close the deal later this year.
US Steel, once the world’s largest corporation, was the world’s 27th largest steelmaker in 2023, according to the World Steel Association. Last year, the company reported net profits of nearly $900 million on revenues of $16 billion.
The contract covers all of U.S. Steel’s ore mining, coking, steelmaking and processing facilities across the country, including the Edgar Thomson Works, which sits above the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh and is still churning out 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 coking plant in nearby Clairton.
Nippon Steel – which the association expects to be the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker by 2023 – and US Steel are currently conducting a comprehensive PR campaign to drive sales.
Their ads are on social media, television and billboards, promising 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 productive.
Flyers are landing in mailboxes in Pittsburgh’s major cities, touting the “future of American steel” and urging residents to contact their elected officials to support the “partnership” between the two companies.
And they say: “US steel remains US steel.”
Pittsburgh has changed since then.
The city is no longer a target for up-to-date investment in the steel industry. The 20-mile-long, connected iron and steel works that stretched from downtown Pittsburgh up to the Monongahela River and once helped the United States industrialize and wage war are gone.
Today, Pittsburgh is considered a city of “medical research and medicine,” where universities and hospitals are the largest employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, has just started to grow again after decades of population decline. Some neighborhoods have recovered and are flourishing after long periods of crisis. A younger generation is attracted to the city’s growing high-tech industry.
Younger residents or newcomers don’t necessarily want steelworkers to lose their jobs, but they also care about the environment. Increasingly, incendiary progressives who are skeptical of fossil fuels and the hefty industries that employ those fuels – such as U.S. Steel plants – are gaining traction in local elections.
Edith Abeyta, an artist and Californian who lives near Edgar Thomson Works, has installed an air monitor in her home to check air quality daily.
For them, the Edgar Thomson Works are a major eyesore and a health hazard.
“Not everywhere you see the smell of rotten eggs or burning metal or big red or black clouds of smoke or flares burning all night,” Abeyta said. “Not everyone has to live with that.”
The steelworkers have also changed.
While the union still supports the Democrats, rank-and-file union members like steelworkers are no longer seen as the bedrock of the Democratic Party coalition, partly because of shrinking union numbers but also because of defections to the 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 steel mill jobs in the region, a small percentage of the jobs that existed when steel production peaked there. He dates the region’s peak of competitive steel production to the 1920s, before technological advances made the region’s metallurgical coal obsolete for steel production and gave rise to electric arc furnaces that no longer require coal.
And while Pittsburgh has recovered from the collapse of the steel industry, some of its smaller neighboring cities have not yet done so.
“And what’s so disturbing to people is the fact that we’ve seen something like this before. It’s changed the region and destroyed people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and CEO of 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 associated with Pittsburgh’s steel industry.
Working in a steel mill was hazardous and did not pay a decent wage until shortly before the collapse of the steel industry in the early 1980s, he says. “If someone was injured, the sirens would go off and the mother would start praying,” he says.
Regardless of who owns them, Buba believes Pittsburgh’s steel mills will be gone in 30 or 40 years – and that political support will be short-lived.
“It will be interesting to see after the election,” said Buba, “how many people are against the sale.”
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