PITTSBURGH — Generations of Pittsburgh residents have worked in steel mills, cheered on the Steelers, ridden roller coasters at Kennywood Amusement Park and gotten a bird’s-eye view of the enormous Edgar Thomson Works, the region’s last blast furnace.
Now U.S. Steel, America’s steeltown’s best-known steel company, is on the verge of being bought by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel Corp., a deal that is stirring election-year political turmoil throughout America’s industrial heartland.
The sale comes amid a new wave of political support for rebuilding American manufacturing and in the midst of a presidential campaign rally in which President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump and their surrogates are touring the politically dynamic Pittsburgh region.
The deal comes after a long period of protectionist U.S. tariffs that analysts say helped revitalize the domestic steel industry. And in a region where steel is all but a thing of the past, the deal has stirred mixed emotions, especially among people over 50 who have seen steel mills close and Rust Belt towns decline.
“The concern is that these jobs have been lost once and they could be lost again,” said Mike Micus, 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 an industry dominated by Chinese, but its employees still have political influence in what is seen as a symbolic battle to save what’s left of American manufacturing.
With the United Steelworkers union opposing the deal, Biden, a Democrat who has clearly voiced support for labor and has the backing of unions, has all but vowed to block the sale of U.S. Steel, saying at a rally with steelworkers in Pittsburgh in April that the company “must remain fully an American company.”
Trump, a Republican who describes himself as pro-labor even as he opposes union organizing efforts as president, has said he would stop them “immediately.”
The Biden administration has indicated that the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States will review the deal for national security concerns. The committee can recommend to the president that it block the deal, and federal law gives him that authority.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is investigating antitrust compliance and the Steelworkers Union has filed a grievance.
In a rare storm of bipartisan unity, the sale drew opposition on both economic and national security grounds from Democratic Senators Bob Casey and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Sherrod Brown of Ohio, as well as Republican Senators J.D. Vance of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Nippon Steel plans to complete the transaction later this year.
Once the world’s largest company, U.S. Steel will be the world’s 27th-largest steelmaker by 2023, according to the World Steel Association. Last year, it had sales of $16 billion and net income of just under $900 million.
The deal includes all of U.S. Steel’s ore mining, coking, steelmaking and processing plants across the country, including the Edgar Thomson Plant, which stands on the Monongahela River just south of Pittsburgh and is still churning out steel plate 150 years after it was built. U.S. Steel employs 3,000 people at four major plants in Pennsylvania, including the Edgar Thomson Plant and the nation’s largest coking 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 currently conducting extensive public relations efforts to promote the sale.
Advertisements on social media, TV screens and billboards promise to protect jobs, move Nippon Steel’s U.S. headquarters to Pittsburgh from Houston and invest in making aging Pittsburgh-area plants cleaner and more efficient.
Flyers dropped off in mailboxes across the Pittsburgh area tout the “future of American steel” and urge residents to contact their elected officials to support the “partnership” between the two companies.
And they say, “US Steel remains US Steel.”
Pittsburgh, on the other hand, is a strange place.
No longer is it a destination for new steel investment. Gone is the nearly 20-mile (32-kilometer) stretch of iron and steel mills that powered America’s industrial and war efforts, stretching from downtown Pittsburgh up the Monongahela River.
Today, Pittsburgh is considered an “education and health” city, with universities and hospitals being major employers.
Allegheny County, which surrounds Pittsburgh, is finally growing again after decades of population decline, with some of the city’s neighborhoods thriving after years of hardship and younger generations drawn to the city’s expanding tech industry.
Younger residents and newcomers, who don’t necessarily want steelworkers to lose their jobs, are also concerned about environmental issues, and anti-establishment progressives who view fossil fuels and heavy industry like U.S. Steel plants that use them as fuels increasingly have become prominent in local elections.
Edith Abeyta, an artist and California transplant who lives near the Edgar Thompson Works, has installed an air monitor in her home to check the air quality daily.
To her, the Edgar Thompson plant is a major eyesore and a health threat.
“You don’t go everywhere you go and smell like rotten eggs or burning metal or see big plumes of red or black smoke or flares that burn all night long,” Abeyta said. “Not everybody lives like that.”
Steelworkers have also changed.
While unions still support Democrats, rank-and-file blue-collar union members like steelworkers are no longer seen as the base of the Democratic coalition, partly because of declining union membership but also because of defections to the Republican Party. In 2016, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win the Rust Belt states of Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Christopher Bream, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Studies, estimates that steel jobs in the region are 5,000, a tiny fraction of the number of steel jobs in the industry’s heyday. Bream says the region’s steel industry peaked in competitiveness in the 1920s, after technological advances eliminated the need for metallurgical coal in steelmaking and the coal-free electric arc furnace emerged.
While Pittsburgh has recovered from the collapse of its steel industry, some of its smaller neighbors have not.
“What’s making people so concerned is the fact that we’ve been through something like this before, and it changed communities and devastated people’s lives,” said August Carlino, president and CEO of Homestead-based Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation.
Tony Bubba, a filmmaker who lives near the Edgar Thomson plant and whose father worked in the steelworks for 44 years, believes there is misplaced nostalgia for Pittsburgh’s steel industry.
Steelworks, he says, were dangerous jobs that didn’t pay decent wages until just before the steel industry collapsed in the early 1980s. “If someone got hurt, the sirens would go off and my mother would start praying,” he says.
Regardless of who owns it, Buba predicts Pittsburgh’s steel mills will be gone in 30 or 40 years, and political support will soon disappear.
“It will be interesting to see how many people oppose the sale after the election,” Buba said.
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Follow Mark Levy twitter.com/timelywriter.
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