Saturday, September 12, 2009
by Mark Gruenberg, PAI staff writer
HOMESTEAD, Penn. (PAI)--Former Steelworker Mike Stout was the last man out of U.S Steel’s historic factories in Homestead, Pa. Fellow former Steelworker Jay Weinberg may be one of the first men in the new manufacturing future of the U.S. that the Obama administration and organized labor envision.
But there are a lot of pitfalls in between.
Stout was the last, for lack of a better term, chief shop steward for USW Local 1397 at Homestead, the mighty steel giant’s 5.5 miles' worth of plants just outside of Pittsburgh, and site of the infamous and deadly 1892 confrontation between Pinkerton guards hired by the then-monolithic firm and striking workers, seeking union recognition and decent wages and working conditions.
The plants are gone, replaced by an enormous line of shopping malls and strip stores along the Monongahela River outside town -- save for a few buildings saved in a park and a giant steel ladle, which is unlabelled, standing as an icon at the main mall’s parking lot. There’s an historic marker quoting the workers in their 1892 confrontation.
The jobs in those malls, some of them held by ex-Homestead workers, pay the minimum wage or maybe a little more. U.S. Steel started shutting down Homestead, at one time a symbol of U.S. industrial might, in the early 1980s. As the last steward for the last 2,000 workers in the last mill, Stout turned out the lights on May 23, 1986. He still speaks scathingly about how the shutdown occurred.
It began, Stout said, when U.S. Steel, years before, started joint ventures with steel firms in Brazil and South Korea for the slab steel, semi-finished steel and structural steel that the Homestead workers -- who numbered 8,000 when Stout began his career there -- made.
Then the firm said it would shut Homestead over a period of years and prepared to sell off the plant, its buildings and its machinery for scrap. The Steelworkers campaigned to save the plant, unsuccessfully, Stout said. And the company set a big condition on any deal: The new buyers would have to agree not to use the buildings or machinery to make steel. Bids came from, among others, Iraq and Pakistan.
“The older workers, in their 50s and 60s, nobody would employ them,” Stout says of his former USW colleagues. “Most ended up taking two or three minimum-wage jobs” to keep food on their families' tables and a roof over their heads.
“Over 75% of the workers less than 40 years of age had to move out of the area, the bulk of them to Florida and California, but also to other states," Stout said.
"The sports announcers around the country, when they televise a (Pittsburgh) Steelers football game out of town, see all that black and gold” in the stands “and say ‘My, my, those Steeler fans travel good.’ They don’t travel; they had to move.”
The fate of Homestead workers in the Mon Valley parallels that in other tradi-tional industries in the U.S., from cars to mines to textile mills. Federal data show U.S. factories employed 11.77 million workers in August, just over 8 percent of total U.S. non-farm employment. Factory employment has been on a 10-year multi-million-worker slide.
Employment in textiles, apparel and textile product mills has declined from just over 1 million in 1999 to 437,700 now. The Detroit-based car companies have shed so many workers that the UAW’s membership is now almost evenly split between auto and parts workers on one side and non-auto workers -- writers, college professors, etc. -- on the other. otal employment in cars and parts, including Detroit and the foreign-owned “transplants,” is down 208,000 in one year, to 649,700.
Where have those workers gone? Those that found jobs are working in the service sector for the most part, with some taking work that teenagers ordinarily do. Others wind up in low-paying nonunion jobs, such as in hospitals. But the labor movement and the Obama administration want to bring U.S. factories back.
Their vehicle is plants that create “green” products, such as the USW-organized Gamesa windmill factory and Maglev Inc., a plant in nearby McKeesport -- also part of the Mon Valley -- that plans to make 200-foot-long steel rail beams for magnetic levitation, energy-efficient, environmentally friendly interurban passenger trains.
The Steelworkers, the United Transportation Union and the area building trades council collectively own half the stock in the privately held 20-year-old Maglev.
Each such beam must be individually measured by high-technology laser imaging and carving and curved to tolerances of 3-8ths of an inch. Each weighs 125 tons. The maglev trains would be on pylons 16 feet off the ground. Once the system is erected, it would need little maintenance because the trains would have few moving parts, other than doors.
Construction of steel beams needed for a 200-mile maglev system, company officials say, would take all the steel produced by the biggest remaining mill in the U.S., in Gary, Ind., if the mill operated around the clock -- for a year.
And maglev trains would save power, Weinberg says, because the magnets pulling the trains -- sculpted to hug the single track -- along would be energized section by section, not all along the line. That’s unlike current electrified rail lines or mass transit systems.
Weinberg, also a former USW local president at Homestead -- “I was one of the radicals” during a strike there, he says -- is vice president of Maglev. His plant is in the 1905-era shell of what had been U.S. Steel’s pipe and tube factory. The firm just won a $28 million grant for other work.
Maglev’s going to bid, by Oct. 2, for $3.2 billion of the $8 billion Obama’s stimulus law allots for high-speed intercity rail construction. The money would pay for steel to build a 54-mile line, plus its control room, between Pittsburgh, its airport and eastwards.
If they win that pact, Weinberg says, “we’ll have to build a 1-million-square-foot factory, employing 1,200 USW members, all wearing white jackets” because they’ll be working with high-tech computerized welding and shaping processes.
In the meantime, Maglev could subcontract work out to other unionized plants nationwide, Weinberg added. Already, several Boilermakers come to Maglev for specialized tasks.
But here’s the catch. While U.S Steel at Homestead employed 8,000 when Stout started and 2,000 when he closed its doors for the final time, Maglev’s total workforce has varied from a high of 30 to its present number: 5.
It’ll help create the “green” factory jobs economy Obama and labor envision, but how many will there be? And when? The answers are unclear, and up to Congress.
The Apollo Alliance, which USW strongly pushes, and whose ideas are a big part of Obama’s reindustrialization program, says a 10-year multi-billion dollar investment in green technology would create hundreds of thousands of new U.S. factory jobs.
Stout’s idea is the U.S. equivalent of the Marshall Plan, where U.S. aid and technology helped revive post World War II European industry. But this Marshall Plan would be for ourselves, says Stout, whose present 3-person business, Steel Valley Printers, is unionized.
“An industrial policy would have helped us” when Homestead was closing in 1985-86, Stout says. Obama apparently agrees: He just named former USW industrial specialist Ron Bloom as his special advisor on reviving U.S manufacturing.
But with no such policy? “We’ll become a concubine of China,” Stout gloomily concludes. ###
