Steelworkers Assail Korea Imports
The United Steelworkers of America plans to mount a major protest and lobbying campaign in an effort to kill U.S. Steel’s recently announced deal to import South Korean steel for use at a Northern California finishing mill, Steelworkers President Lynn Williams said Friday.
Williams said the union still is trying to decide on specific tactics for pressuring U.S. Steel to drop its import deal. He said, however, that the campaign likely will be similar to the union’s $2-million drive in 1983 that it believes played a role in halting U.S. Steel’s plan to import steel from Britain for use at one of its large Pennsylvania mills.
In that campaign, the union took out newspaper ads protesting the plan and filed unfair labor practice charges.
Williams said the new union campaign against the Korean deal will include putting pressure on U.S. Steel in contract talks set for next summer.
U.S. Steel announced Monday that it would form a joint venture with South Korea’s Pohang Iron & Steel to modernize U.S. Steel’s steel finishing mill in Pittsburg, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In the first agreement of its kind between American and Korean steelmakers, the two companies said they will invest $300 million in the Pittsburg facility over the next four years.
They also said they will begin to process semi-finished steel slabs imported from Korea at the plant. By the time the Reagan Administration’s current steel import quota program expires in October, 1989, Korean imports will be the primary source of steel for finishing at the California mill.
U.S. Steel said the plan will help save 1,100 jobs at Pittsburg but could eliminate 2,400 others at a U.S. Steel mill in Geneva, Utah, that now supplies the basic steel for the Pittsburg finishing operation.
The union is strongly opposed to U.S. Steel’s Korean deal because it could put pressure on other domestic steelmakers to find cheap, foreign sources of semi-finished or slab steel to process in their domestic finishing facilities.
“Once you start down the path of bringing in (basic) steel from Third World countries, you push everyone in that direction,” Williams said. U.S. Steel, however, argues that the Korean deal is the only way for the firm to keep its Pittsburg plant open and for it to remain competitive with direct imports in the Western market.
Bill Hoffman, a U.S. Steel spokesman, noted that imports now account for about 60% of the Western steel market and that it would be difficult for U.S. Steel to stay in the regional market without the use of cheap, high-quality semi-finished steel.
He added that it would cost $1 billion to modernize the Utah mill to produce the kind of cast steel that Western customers now demand and that Pohang will supply for the Pittsburg plant.
Hoffman insisted that the union’s campaign will not derail the Korean deal.
