Ailing Wheeling-Pittsburgh Fails to Make $5.7-Million Payment : Steelmaker Misses Pension Fee Deadline

Financially crippled Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel passed a deadline for making a $5.7-million pension payment Wednesday, and U.S. Steel demanded to share any concessions that the strikebound company wins from union workers.

The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. said in a statement released in Washington that it would take no immediate action on Wheeling-Pittsburgh’s failure to make the pension payment.

The federal agency, which guarantees pensions for 8,200 Wheeling-Pittsburgh employees and approximately 10,000 retirees, along with about 38 million other American workers, said it is “hopeful that the parties . . . resolve their differences to everyone’s satisfaction.”

The agency said it would provide pension benefits, although not necessarily at levels specified in the plan, if either it or the company moved to terminate the plan.

United Steelworkers negotiator Paul D. Rusen said last Friday that Wheeling-Pittsburgh had been bluffing for leverage at the bargaining table when it warned that a continued walkout would force the pension plan to be terminated. He said the company has $62 million on hand and can afford the payment.

Wheeling-Pittsburgh’s directors adjourned a regular monthly meeting Wednesday without issuing a statement, spokesman Ken Maxcy said.

The nation’s seventh-largest steel producer, unable to repay loans approaching $530 million, filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on April 16 and subsequently won court approval to dissolve its labor contract.

Union members set up picket lines at nine plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia on July 21, when Wheeling-Pittsburgh moved to impose sharp cuts in wages and benefits and rewrite work rules. The walkout was the first against a major steel producer in 26 years.

Federal mediators scheduled a meeting with company negotiators Thursday to explore the possibility of resuming bargaining. No talks have been held since a session held in the hours before the walkout began.

Meanwhile, the chairman of U.S. Steel, the nation’s largest steel producer, said Wednesday that his company deserved to share whatever labor cost savings that the USW grants to Wheeling-Pittsburgh.

“Whatever the rates are that are negotiated by the steelworkers over time, that’s obviously the rate we would have to have in order to remain competitive. Those are the rates that we would intend to have and those are the rates that we will have,” David Roderick said at a news conference.

Union leaders have said healthy corporations like U.S. Steel don’t deserve the same labor cost breaks being demanded by Wheeling-Pittsburgh.

“Whatever is done, there will be a reference point because we do have to compete with Wheeling-Pittsburgh,” Roderick said.

In Washington on Wednesday, Rusen briefed staff members of six senators and four representatives from Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

“Our purpose was to have sort of a fact-finding briefing,” USW Washington lobbyist Jack Sheehan said. “We did not ask the members to take any course of action.”

The talks included the USW’s complaint that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Warren W. Bentz misinterpreted 1984 revisions to the bankruptcy laws in freeing Wheeling-Pittsburgh to void the year remaining on its union contract.

“I think the intent of Congress was to protect the contract up to a point,” Sheehan said. “It was not its purpose to make it easy to break.”