Andrew Grossman
Nippon Steel, the largest steel corporation in Japan, announced in December 2023 that it is purchasing US Steel at a price of $14.9 billion.
Politicians where the largest US Steel facilities are located have made statements to monopoly media condemning the sale to Nippon Steel on the grounds that it threatens the national security of the country to have such a large share of the steel industry in foreign capitalists’ hands, rhetoric the United Steelworkers (USW) union leadership has echoed. USW leadership has also stated concern over the future of the plants and their labor contracts at the US Steel facilities to be handed over to Nippon Steel.
Nippon Steel has stated it will abide by the USW/US Steel collective bargaining agreements already in place, and that it it accepts the current US Steel strategic plan—which does not include shuttering its largest facilities. However, the US Steel plan does include investment into the newer, electric arc furnace technology which combines pig iron with scrap steel to make “greener” steel, requiring fewer workers and already destined to shutter older blast furnaces and throw thousands of workers into unemployment while snatching up government green energy money.
Democrat and Republican politicians are united in condemning the sale on national security grounds: with Republicans calling it the sale of a “critical piece of America’s defense industrial base” while Democrat senator John Fetterman of Braddock, PA, condemned the sale as the loss of “national security” and “security of our steel communities,” while criticizing “greedy corporations willing to sell out [hard-working Americans’] communities.” Fetterman equates the war industry of the US imperialists with the continued employment of steel workers, painting all workers with the same bloody brush as the few labor aristocrats living off the imperialists’ ill-gotten goods.
Fetterman has recently became a darling of the monopoly media for his staunch pro-Israel stance during the genocidal efforts of the imperialists to crush the Palestinian armed resistance, distancing himself from his fellow populists in the Democratic Party who have themselves taken a more flexible approach to defending the genocide.
The union leadership is also crying crocodile tears about the danger to national security. USW president David McCall said in a statement that the deal: “…demonstrates the same greedy, shortsighted attitude that has guided US Steel for far too long… We remained open throughout this process to working with US Steel to keep this iconic American company domestically owned and operated, but instead it chose to push aside the concerns of its dedicated workforce and sell to a foreign-owned company.”
These are the concerns not of the proletarians who will continue to be exploited ruthlessly by monopoly capital, whether American-owned or Japanese-owned, but are the concerns of the “dedicated” bureaucrats and labor aristocrats, worried that their privileged position in regard to the class they betray may be replaced by Japanese bureaucrats and aristocrats.
Apparently the union bureaucracy is worried more about “national security” than the already existing plans to shutter facilities and lay off workers via the transition to electric arc furnace production, for instance in the mass layoffs at US Steel’s Granite City facility.
According to monopoly media, the United Steelworkers bureaucracy had hoped for Cleveland-Cliffs to purchase US Steel, as the union currently has various collective bargaining agreements with that company and thus felt assured that there would be a continuation of the imposed peace between labor and capital.
The USW bureaucracy has repeatedly forced through sell-out contracts on steelworkers at US Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs, and elsewhere, refusing to allow strikes after strike authorization votes and forcing through contracts with no assurances against mass layoffs and which do not keep wages in line even with inflation. The latest, 4-year contract at US Steel was enacted at the end of 2022.
