Labor Bitterness Runs Deep at USX Plant in Gary, Ind.
When Elbert H. Gary, first chairman of U.S. Steel, came down from Chicago in 1906, he built his steel mill here first, this city second.
Today, the workers at Judge Gary’s mill don’t think priorities are much different at the company he helped found. Profits come first, they say; labor second.
“The company? They’re low down. Can’t nobody say nothing good about them,” Samuel Roper, a 59-year-old blast furnace operator, charged. “I think most people here have lost all trust in the company,” added Evan Kisela, who has worked at the Gary mill for 30 years.
And that, in a nutshell, is why they say they are still willing to walk the picket lines as the first bite of November frost hits this decaying city, three months into the nationwide walkout by 22,000 members of the United Steelworkers union against USX Corp.
The deeply embittered attitude among the workers here also goes a long way toward explaining why USX, formerly U.S. Steel, has so far been unable to gain peace on the labor front, which it may need badly in order to concentrate on New York investor Carl C. Icahn’s bid to gain control of the big Pittsburgh-based energy and steel conglomerate.
The distrust of management felt by the workers at the Gary Works, USX’s flagship mill, as well as at other facilities around the nation, seems to runs deep. It dates back at least three years, in fact, to the last round of contract talks between the Steelworkers and USX.
After granting contract concessions in 1983 in what union workers say they thought was an effort to save jobs, they watched in dismay as layoffs later soared, in part because the company dramatically increased its use of non-union outside contractors to perform union work.
Since 1983, USX’s employment rolls (including workers laid off for less than two years) have plunged from 74,681 to just 30,718. Steelworkers Local 1014, the union’s largest local at USX, had 9,800 active members at the Gary Works in 1983; today it has just 3,500.
Workers also charge that USX’s drive to boost productivity in the last few years has led to drastically increased workloads for the remaining employees at the Gary Works and at other mills. In the last year before the walkout, union officials and workers charge, mill crews at Gary were cut to skeleton manning levels, heavy overtime became commonplace, and injury rates in the mill soared. “In my department, the number of people has been cut in half in the last year or two, while the work level has tripled,” Kisela said.
USX refused to respond to any charges made by union members at Gary.
As a result, rank-and-file union members have concluded that weaker contracts translate into fewer, lower paying and more difficult jobs--no matter what the company says about the need for more competitive wage rates to roll back the import tide.
So they say they are determined to resist USX’s demands for steep cuts in wages, benefits and staffing levels, especially if management continues to balk at the union’s demand that the steelmaker place limits on its use of subcontractors.
‘Fighting for Their Jobs’
“Our members are convinced that they are fighting for their jobs over the issue of the contracting out of work,” Steelworkers’ spokesman Dick Fontana declared. “They’re saying it doesn’t matter if you get $25 an hour in wages and benefits if you don’t have a job to begin with.”
The bitter attitude toward management common today among the rank and file has reduced pressure on the union’s leadership to agree to drastic concessions in order to reach a quick settlement.
The union’s success in having the dispute defined as a lockout by most states--which has allowed its members to collect long-term unemployment compensation on top of their strike pay--also has given the rank and file the financial wherewithal to resist management’s demands. As Gary machine operator Charlie Johnson insisted: “I’d be willing to go back to work for the old contract, but not for any cut.”
The union has thus been given some leeway in how to approach contract negotiations, which resumed Oct. 21 for the first time since the walkout began Aug. 1.
“Our interests are not in prolonging this thing,” Fontana said, “but what the attitude among the workers does give our negotiators is the ability to use a firm hand in dealing with the company.”
A Union of Survivors
So the aging, veteran steelworkers here--high-seniority survivors of wave after wave of layoffs--watch and wait as the sparring between the bargainers for the two sides goes on.
Last week, Roderick said that unless a settlement is reached early this month, USX would lose steel orders for the first quarter of 1987 and so would not reopen its mills until next spring. The company also had hopes of hammering out an agreement by today.
Union spokesman Fontana said that while the company’s target is unrealistic, it is possible that a settlement could be worked out as early as the second week in November, but only if USX moves further to compromise. But the fact that the union has not yet called its full bargaining committee back to its Pittsburgh headquarters for consultations indicates that substantial progress has not yet been made in the talks, Fontana acknowledged.
Still, many here insist that they are ready to continue their walkout, the steel industry’s first major labor dispute in 27 years, as long as it takes; some have even come to see it as a form of class struggle--with middle-class steelworkers fighting management’s efforts to put them back into the ranks of the working poor.
“These corporate managers at USX, they’re sickening,” asserted Charles Gregory, who has put in 27 years at Gary. “They don’t want to share the cake, they want it all. They don’t want you to be able to buy a car or send your kids to college.”
Younger Workers Disappear
At the same time, since almost all of the mill’s younger workers have already been laid off, the older workers remaining are, for the most part, better able to weather a long walkout.
“Most of us prepared financially for this for the last two years and so we’re pretty well set,” said Gary Bozarth, a 52-year-old instrument repairman at Gary. “A lot of us have 20 or 30 years in, so we’re doing all right. It’s usually the younger kids who get in trouble financially during a strike.”
So while USX Chairman David M. Roderick and his management staff move to restructure the company in the face of the swirling takeover battle with Icahn, the pickets here hang on. They debate their future, wondering whether Roderick or Icahn would be the better chairman. And despite his reputation for taking on unions at Trans World Airlines, which he already controls, the workers here are not sure that Icahn could be any worse than Roderick.
Says Kisela: “I really think Icahn might be better to deal with. I have no use for that Roderick at all.”
