Chief of USX Labor Relations to Resign
J. Bruce Johnston will leave as head of labor relations at USX Corp. this month, two years after he lost the last big piece of his former domain as one of the most powerful labor negotiators in the steel industry.
Johnston, 58, will join the Pittsburgh law firm of Alder, Cohen & Grigsby to advise clients on labor matters while continuing as a consultant to the Pittsburgh-based oil and steel giant USX, the company said.
Johnston was chairman of the committee that negotiated labor contracts for the nation’s largest steelmaking companies until coordinated bargaining dissolved in 1985 amid the industry’s financial crisis.
As committee chairman, he was the lead negotiator for the industry during the 1977, 1980 and 1983 talks with the United Steelworkers union. Johnston saw the tail end of the industry’s era of expansion and world dominance and the beginning of its painful contraction and awakening to a new order of world competition.
He still headed bargaining for USX in 1986 when the producers negotiated separate contracts. USX, the largest steelmaker in the United States, took a six-month strike by the union in its determination to keep labor costs to a minimum.
“He’s a wonderful raconteur and a brilliant debater, and it’s a great challenge to be in an argument with him, which I was from time to time,” said Lynn Williams, USW president.
Johnston deserves some credit for the beginnings in the 1980 industry talks of labor-management participation teams, one of the progressive arrangements that has become a hallmark of the industry’s restructuring, Williams said. But whatever progress USX made on its own in labor relations soon disintegrated in the bitter battle with the union over an aborted company plan to import steel from Britain for processing on USX mills.
Thomas Sterling, a vice president, took charge of labor relations at the USX steel division after the strike ended Feb. 1, 1987. The oil and diversified units by then had their own labor relations hierarchy, shrinking Johnston’s domain to the 900-member corporate staff, although he remained responsible for pension and benefit programs corporatewide.
