CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Union Dismayed : Workers who helped construct and operate Kaiser Steel plant say they, and not foreign nationals, should have jobs taking it apart for reassembly in China.

In this heartland of die-hard blue-collar labor, it could have been news for rejoicing that they are hiring again at the old Kaiser Steel plant, erected on a pig farm after the outbreak of World War II to help build America’s war machine.

Instead, the news that 300 jobs have been filled in a two-year contract is generating jeers and outcry from the region’s labor community.

The job is to dismantle Plant No. 2, the 22-story icon to industry, a state-of-the-art steelmaking behemoth so hot, so tough, it won a role in the final scenes of “Terminator II.”

The decommissioned plant hasn’t produced a slab of steel since 1982, though, and the job of dismantling it has gone not to the men who built it in the 1970s, but to 300 Chinese nationals. Their company bought the plant so it can be disassembled piece by piece, shipped to China, reconstructed and fired up again.

About 250 men, many of them hoisting American flags, wearing jackets emblazoned with union logos and carrying signs reading “An American Job Is a Terrible Thing to Waste,” were wondering at a protest rally Friday, what gives?

“Dammit, we want those 300 jobs!” labor leader Joe Perez bellowed into a loudspeaker, sometimes drowned out by the supportive air horns of passing truckers. “These jobs don’t belong to those (Chinese) guys, they belong to us. We put this thing up and we should be able to take it down.”

All about him, union laborers, some of whom helped build the plant or worked in it, grumbled that they’ve got mouths to feed, mortgages to meet and taxes to pay, while 300 Fontana jobs are going to workers from some other place on the planet.

“We want our dignity,” said Bill Hughes, a local man who for years worked in the steel facility. “What’s dignity? A job.”

The demise in the early 1980s of the 40-year-old Kaiser steel factory, a symbol of all that is good and gritty about American labor, was a monumental passing to a lot of old-timers around here.

At its heyday in the 1950s, Kaiser had 10,000 employees. When it was closed--brought to its knees by changing economies and new environmental regulations--7,000 workers got pink slips.

By then, Plant No. 2, which turned molten iron ore into steel slabs, had only been on line for about two years. It was Kaiser’s most high-tech, automated plant, the crowning glory of Kaiser’s steelmaking efforts and the largest steelmaking facility under one roof in the nation.

And it was the very thing China wanted. So it bought the plant for $15 million.

China Metallurgical Import and Export Corp. won the necessary visas to send over 300 workers to take it down. The use of its own labor force was an absolute, deal-breaking condition of the sale, said lawyer Ronald Klasko, an immigration specialist retained by the Chinese.

The visas were issued administratively by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service--with the blessing of the State Department, the Labor Department, the Bush Administration, the lieutenant governor’s office, the local congressman, the local mayor and the owner of the San Bernardino Econo Lodge, who has leased his 136-room motel for two years to the Chinese company and for whom the recession is suddenly over.

The government issued special work visas on the grounds that the work was too specialized to be accomplished by American labor, said Thomas Cook, a deputy director for the INS office in Los Angeles.

In this case, Cook said, the 300 Chinese laborers--who have dismantled other factories outside of China for relocation there--are specifically trained to mark a plant’s pieces in Chinese characters so the same team can properly reassemble them.

“We built the plant, and we can dismantle it,” said Perez, executive secretary of the Riverside-San Bernardino Building and Construction Trades Council of the AFL-CIO, which represents 50,000 workers in the Inland Empire.

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The dismantling job will generate more than $30 million for the local and state economy, not to mention opening the door for new revenue when the property is recycled, said Ron Gray, spokesman for Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy.

U.S. Rep. George Brown (D-San Bernardino) said that although he sympathized with the local labor outcry, he supported the deal.

“There will be many more union jobs created when that plant is removed and we can proceed in creating a new industrial center,” he said. “If this deal wasn’t permitted, the plant would be standing there indefinitely and no jobs would be created.”

The current owner of the facility, California Steel Industries Inc.--which bought most of Kaiser’s assets at the Fontana site eight years ago--is happy to shed the plant, said company Vice President Matthew MacFadden.

Fontana Mayor Gary Boyles remembers when his stepfather worked at Kaiser as a painter, and his father-in-law administered Kaiser’s on-site company hospital.

And he doesn’t buy the local labor beef. “The Chinese are buying it,” he said. “It’s theirs. It seems they’d have the right to hire the people they want to do the work.”

MacFadden of California Steel wonders if local labor is being a little hard on the Chinese firm. CSI employs about 950 workers, making products out of imported steel.

CSI is owned by a Japanese-Brazilian partnership, MacFadden noted, “and there are 950 Americans working in Fontana, thanks to foreign capital.”