by Samuel Messidor
US Steel is moving forward with selling the company to Japanese monopoly Nippon Steel after the United Steelworkers’ arbitration dispute attempting to block the sale was defeated September 25, with the arbitration board arguing that Nippon Steel’s written promises to abide by the current USW-US Steel contract were sufficient.
Nippon Steel, one of the largest steel corporations in the world, will buy US Steel for $14.1 billion, or $55 a share by the end of the year according to the seller. This is $20 more per share than Cleveland-Cliffs’ offer from earlier this year, and will lead to massive payouts for US Steel’s financiers. The Cleveland-Cliffs offer was shot down by the company but the United Steelworkers union leadership supported it, citing a history of amenable contracts and peaceful labor-capital relations between USW and the smaller American steel corporation.
According to monopoly outlet The Washington Post, the Biden-Harris administration said it will block the deal, citing “national security” concerns presented in the study of the sale by the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have cited the same concerns. Some politicians are tinging the chauvinism with “American workers first” populist rhetoric, such as Democratic Senator John Fetterman—the staunch Zionist who lives near from the Edgar Thompson works and who recently said he “loved” Israel’s pager and walkie-talkie detonation attacks in Lebanon.
The union has not struggled against the mass layoffs hitting steel and metals plants in the US for the last few years, instead expressing faith in the corporations to take care of the workers. Union bureaucrats have echoed the “national security” fear-mongering of the Biden administration. Japanese capital has been developed subserviently to US imperialism since the end of World War II.
USW’s President David McCall told monopoly media in Pittsburgh that “in the event of a national need, we ought to be able to control those [blast furnace] facilities”, as if the workers and the imperialists share the same interests and “national needs.” Imperialists want to maintain a certain amount of domestic heavy industry in order to support their gigantic war machine—this is for the “security” of finance capital and monopolist profit, both in oppressing the third world and in staving off the overproduction crisis.
In early September, US Steel organized a rally of workers and executives in downtown Pittsburgh—which contains both the US Steel headquarters and the USW headquarters—in support of the sale to Nippon Steel. Workers with speaking slots at the rally expressed gratitude to their exploiters for providing their families jobs for generations, part of the company’s narrative that the Nippon sale will save domestic steel production.
In a face-off with the White House and the USW union bureaucracy, US Steel says that the deal is the best way to secure future investment into domestic steel manufacturing, and has threatened to shut down blast furnace production—a process they’re already doing—and move US Steel headquarters out of Pittsburgh. In general, the company is threatening to shut down the older, more labor-intensive, and largely unionized steel plants like the US Steel flagships the Gary works in Gary IN and the Edgar Thompson works Pittsburgh, PA if the deal is blocked.
US Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs, as well as other steel and metal corporations, are already shuttering plants, laying off whole shifts, automating, and destroying the overproduced means of production amid the developing capitalist economic crisis. The capitalists are replacing older, blast-furnace steel production with electric-arc steel facilities, which turn scrap and recycled metal into steel and which require fewer workers. This is peddled as “green” steel production on the one hand, while the companies lay off masses of steel workers on the other hand. Capitalists invest in new technology when forced by conditions of economic crisis in order to claw their way back to higher rates of profitability—the crisis is ongoing and Nippon Steel will not be immune to it, either.
US Steel’s threats are idle—that is, the threats to idle the plants are already being accomplished, though Nippon Steel has said it will not shut any plants, union or otherwise, until after 2026, dangling a sword over the workers which was already unsheathed by “their own” imperialists.
