Goodbye Stelco

[SteelTown]

U.S. Steel lockout over

After 11 months on the picket line, U.S. Steel workers voted to accept the company’s offer Saturday night.

[SteelTown]

I can definitely tell Stelco is back. Drive up or down the 403 along the Escarpment and you can smell Stelco.

[SteelTown]

Ottawa settles lawsuit with U.S. Steel

http://www.thespec.com/news/business...with-u-s-steel

The lawsuit between U. S. Steel and the federal government has been settled.

In a statement today Industry Minister Christian Paradis said the settlement gives Canada “significant” assurance of jobs and investment in Canada.

The minister says the company, which acquired Stelco in 2007, has committed to keep operating in Hamilton and Nanticoke on the shore of Lake Erie until at least 2015.

The company is also promising to invest $50 million in capital spending by the end of 2015.

[SteelTown]

No U.S. Steel production in Hamilton this year

http://www.thespec.com/news/business...lton-this-year

US Steel chairman John Surma says steel making operations in Hamilton will not resume this year.

He told a conference call with industry analysts this afternoon the cost of getting the plant back into service is too high for the current market.

“We are planning to run everything we have except for Hamilton pretty much flat out,” he said.

Before restarting the Hamilton plant, Surma said the company needs a strong market recovery to justify the cost of putting the factory back into service.

Surma was explaining the company’s $68 million loss last year.

[CaptainKirk]

It's time has come. Time to say goodbye to Stelco and start re purposing that land.

Hamilton is doing just fine now.

[Jon Dalton]

Well it seems awfully convenient for US Steel that they are able to keep their US facilities near full production, without the competition of a privately owned Stelco. Could it be that this is why they purchased it?

[markbarbera]

The Nanticoke facility (also a former Stelco property now owned by U.S. Steel) will operate at near-full capacity steel production for the next year along with the other USS properties.

[SteelTown]

U. S. Steel reopening part of Hamilton plant in May

http://www.thespec.com/news/business...n-plant-in-may

New life is coming back to part of U. S. Steel’s Hamilton operation.

The company has confirmed it will restart its #3 galvanizing line at the former Stelco plant by the middle of the second quarter of this year – sometime in May.

The move means some of the roughly 250 workers who have been fearing a lay off notice at the end of April will stay employed.

U. S. Steel spokesman Trevor Harris said the decision has been driven by demand from customers in the construction and appliance industries.

“It means a lot of those people are going to have gainful employment after their six month guarantee,” Harris said. “We’re not talking about hundreds of people, but there will be work.”

As for the rest of the Hamilton steel making operation, Harris said there are no current plans to restart the blast furnace.

See tomorrow’s Spectator for the full story.

[SteelTown]

Hiring blitz and recalling laid off workers....

http://m.thespec.com/news/business/a...s-hiring-blitz

[durandy]

Interesting Mahoney article on tour guides at Stelco in the 50s and 60s.

http://www.thespec.com/news/local/ar...-tour-de-force

Would be pretty great to be able to tour some of the factories. Might raise some local pride in our industry again.

[thistleclub]

Welcome to Saudi Albany?
(New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson, Dec 16, 2012)

The people who run U.S. Steel have not had much reason to celebrate in a long time. Once the icon of American manufacturing, the company became shorthand for the country’s industrial decline. For decades, it ignored innovation and was undercut by cheaper Asian producers and outflanked by U.S. start-ups. Its brief glory in the mid-2000s turned out to be fueled by housing-bubble excess; and its stock price has dropped nearly 90 percent since late 2008. A few months ago, John P. Surma, the company’s chairman and C.E.O., addressed a Steel Hall of Fame event at which all the inductees were either long dead or retired. He noted that, given the business climate, his own generation of steel C.E.O.’s might have trouble getting the big prize themselves.

Fortunately, Surma went on, this misery is about to change. The American steel industry recently received the economic equivalent of a gift from the heavens: natural gas extracted by means of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fracking involves a whole lot of long steel pipes being sunk into rock formations thousands of feet beneath the ground in search of hydrocarbons. U.S. Steel, which is based in Pittsburgh, also happens to be right on top of the Marcellus Shale, the oil-rich formation that stretches from New York to Ohio. No one knows exactly how much gas is down there, but modest estimates suggest it’s at least 100 trillion cubic feet. Given this bounty, U.S. Steel recently spent $100 million on a facility whose entire purpose is to make “tubular product” for gas companies.

For Surma, an even bigger gift should come over the next few decades. The switch from coal to cheaper natural gas will save U.S. Steel hundreds of millions of dollars a year. These savings will be amplified by the fact that the company’s competitors in Europe and Asia will need to pay much more. In fact, many economists say that fracking will soon fundamentally shift global economic logic to uniquely benefit the United States. Ed Morse, an influential energy analyst at Citigroup, argues that the natural-gas industry will bring around three million new jobs to the United States by the end of this decade. He also expects that fracking will add up to 3 percent to our G.D.P. and trillions in additional tax revenue. Along the way, it will turn around perennial stragglers, like steel and manufacturing. For millions of workers, there could not be any better news.

+ Some additional detail on the $100m Lorain facility and USS' interactive map of the Marcellus Shale formation.

[thistleclub]

U.S. Steel to start third lock out Sunday
(Hamilton Spectator, Steve Arnold, April 27 2013)

For the third time since it was allowed into Canada U. S. Steel will lock out a portion of its Canadian workforce on Sunday to back demands for contract concessions.

The company announced the action Thursday morning affecting about 1,000 workers.

“I really don’t think anything can be done to stop this now,” said Bill Ferguson, president of Local 8782 of the United Steel Workers. “This company has had three sets of negotiations since it came to Canada and this is its third lock out.”

Lake Erie workers were previously locked out for eight months from August 2009-April 2010 and Hamilton workers faced a similar confrontation from November 2010 to October 2011.

Those earlier lock outs were over company demands for sweeping changes to the pension plans. Those demands included the end of pension indexing for retirees and closing the defined benefit pension plan to new hires, pushing them instead into a defined contribution system.

The issues in this contract round aren’t as stark. The company wants to cap vacation entitlements for new employees, to compress more than two dozen job classes into eight and to change the cost of living formula to pay 80 per cent less than it does now.

The company’s package seemed to offer a general wage increase of $1.01 an hour – but workers quickly identified that as a cost of living allowance payment they’d earned under the previous contract. The company’s real offer was no raise for three years.

U. S. Steel also lowered the trigger for payments under its profit sharing plan – a move workers dismissed since the plan did not pay anything last year and workers don’t expect it to pay anything this year either. They also note dire warnings from the company that the Nanticoke plant is a major money loser.

“A lot of the things in that package are things they already owe us from the last contract,” Ferguson said. “It’s all part of their propaganda campaign.”

U. S. Steel Canada spokesman Trevor Harris did not return repeated calls for comment.

American steel analyst Chuck Bradford said the confrontation comes at a time when U. S. Steel is losing money in a soft market and wondered if a “get tough” attitude with Canadian workers isn’t a scrap being thrown to market analysts who will pass judgment on the company’s first quarter earnings report Tuesday.

“Maybe they’re trying to make a show because of the losses they’re going to report on Tuesday,” he said. “The issues this time out really aren’t that big.

“We can only hope that some level heads realize this really isn’t in anyone’s best interests,” he added.