President Donald Trump rallied hundreds of orange-clad workers in West Mifflin this evening with his first lengthy remarks about a reported deal to keep U.S. Steel’s thousands of jobs in the Mon Valley and elsewhere with a big assist from Japan’s Nippon Steel.
“For generations United States Steel was synonymous with greatness and now it will be synonymous with greatness once again,” Trump said at U.S. Steel’s Irvin Plant on a rainy Friday. “We saved the company,” the president said, indicating that his tariffs on foreign products, including steel, have made the industry viable again.
The company’s headquarters will stay in Pittsburgh, Trump said.
In the valley in days leading up to the rally, residents and officials from West Mifflin to Clairton were generally relieved at the news, teased a week ago on social media, that Nippon would bring investment to the American metals icon, possibly to the tune of $14 billion on top of a purchase price in the same ballpark. If there was a deep breath, though, it was taken with caution.
Along State Street, past the entrance to U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, nearly every open business — the tattoo parlor, the burger joint and the laundromat — hung signs with both Nippon and U.S. Steel logos: “Save Our Steel Works” they read.
At a Thursday event in the same Mon Valley city, U.S. Rep Summer Lee noted that “Pittsburgh still has some of the most polluted air in the entire nation. It’s our children who end up in the ER with asthma attacks, our students who miss class because they can’t breathe.”
Due largely to the coke works, Clairton has long struggled with pollution and underinvestment, as most of the legacy steeltowns along the Monongahela River have.
Trump instead focused on economics and national pride.
“There’s a lot of money coming your way,” he said early in his remarks about what he called “a blockbuster deal” that will keep U.S. Steel “an American company.”
Aiming for ‘something bigger and better’
“This is a big deal,” Trump said, claiming that it “most importantly” honors local unions.
He added that he learned to respect Nippon leaders through negotiations. “Every time they came in the deal got better and better and better for the workers, because I don’t give a damn about anyone else,” he said.
“If you don’t have steel, you don’t have a country,” he said. “It’s above all a matter of national security.”
“Most importantly, U.S. Steel will continue to be controlled by the U.S.A. – otherwise I wouldn’t have done the deal.”
In the days prior to the rally, state and federal lawmakers who have been briefed on the matter describe a deal in which Nippon will buy U.S. Steel and spend billions on its facilities in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Minnesota. The company would be overseen by an executive suite and board made up mostly of Americans and protected by the U.S. government’s veto power in the form of a “golden share.”
The planned “golden share” for the U.S. amounts to three board members approved by the U.S. government, which will essentially ensure that U.S. Steel can only make decisions that’ll be in the best interests of the United States, McCormick said Tuesday on Fox News.
Pennsylvania Republican Sen. David McCormick came out in favor of the plan, calling it “great” for the domestic steel industry, Pennsylvania, national security and U.S. Steel’s employees.
Pennsylvania’s other senator, Democrat John Fetterman — who lives across the street from U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works blast furnace in Braddock — didn’t explicitly endorse the new proposal. But he said on social media that he had helped jam up Nippon Steel’s original bid until “Nippon coughed up an extra $14B.”
Trump promised at his rally to protect all existing U.S. Steel jobs and said the deal ensures that all local mills will remain “open and thriving” with “no layoffs and no outsourcing whatsoever.” All of the company’s workers will get $5,000 bonuses, he said.
He called Nippon’s impending investment “the largest investment of any kind in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” as well as “in the history of the steel industry in the United States of America.”
The president blamed political incompetence and betrayal for the demise of the steel industry nationally and locally. Federal policy, he said, “cost this country over 100,000 steel jobs and they melted away just like butter.”
“I worked for the American steelworker like no American president has done before,” he claimed, saying that tariffs imposed in his first administration came “just in time.”
“You wouldn’t have a steel mill open in the country if we didn’t do the tariffs,” he said.
A handful of workers took the stage and spoke in favor of the arrangement. Steelworkers for Trump founder Brian Pavlack called it “a great day to be an American steelworker.”
One said a supervisor told him on his first day on the job, “you’re wasting your time.” Now, he said, future generations are guaranteed jobs, “All because of President Trump.”
Trump called out to numerous conservative political figures in the audience, and invited three attendees to the stage: former Steeler running back Rocky Bleier, current quarterback Mason Rudolph and safety Miles Killebrew.
More than an hour before Trump’s arrival, David Burritt, U.S. Steel president, lauded the deal between his company and Nippon as an opportunity to revitalize the region’s flagging industry. Burritt praised Trump as the deal’s linchpin, saying the president “acted decisively, strategically, boldly. He made sure this partnership protects what matters: American jobs, American steel, American manufacturing and American strength.”
“We’re ready to build something better and bigger,” Burritt added.
Takahiro Mori, Nippon’s vice chair, also applauded Trump’s role as a broker after the president initially vowed to block the sale. Mori pledged to make “massive investments” in the aging facilities “that will transform U.S. Steel on the world stage.”
“You have placed your trust in us and we will work hard in the years ahead to honor that trust,” he said to the workers and company leaders gathered inside the West Mifflin plant.
The deal reportedly includes $14 billion in Nippon investments in U.S. Steel, including $2.4 billion in the Mon Valley.
Trump, who has been eager to strike deals and announce new investments in the U.S. since retaking the White House, is also trying to satisfy voters, including blue-collar workers, who elected him as he called to protect U.S. manufacturing.
Camped under a sheltered walkway leading into the plant, Randy McCoy, a U.S. Steel employee of 31 years, said the to-and-fro-ing over the deal — initially opposed by former President Joe Biden — brought uncertainty for workers, but he feels confident it will move forward under Trump’s latest proposal.
“It’s definitely a good thing for U.S. Steel and a good thing for the Mon Valley,” said McCoy, who works at the company’s Clairton Coke Works.
McCoy said, while he’s preparing to retire, keeping the Mon Valley plants running is about investing in the next generation.
“I might make it another few years, but I’m more concerned about the younger people,” he said.
Union leaders, though, have been sceptical about any deal involving Nippon since it was first floated.
After Trump’s rally, United Steelworkers International President David McCall issued a statement reminding that union leadership has not been involved in or consulted on the emerging deal.
“Nippon has a long history of committing unfair trade practices,” including recent steel dumping, McCall said in the statement. “The USW’s only concern has been and continues to be the long-term viability and sustainability of the current USS facilities, so as to safeguard the current and future economic, employment and retirement security of our members and their communities.”
Can a deal bring revitalization, curb violence?
In Clairton, early news of the deal inspired a glimmer of hope in some longtime residents.
“I want to see one thing: A grocery store, and help for a recreation center,” said Richard Ford, a former council president and deacon at Morning Star Baptist Church, which sits atop a hillside over the coke works. The Ford family has lived and led in Clairton for decades.
If the city saw investments that helped with food security and activities for young people, Ford said, “Some people might decide Clairton isn’t such a bad place to move to.”
The community is still having difficulties, he said on Tuesday — a shooting over Memorial Day weekend left a 23-year-old former Clairton Bears high school quarterback dead. “We got our wolves — the sadness of the matter,” Ford said. “Friends shooting friends.”
He’s hoping Nippon has “that capability” to bring prosperity back to a city that has struggled with disinvestment, air pollution, poverty and violence since its heyday in the mid-20th century. “I hope they can afford to be better neighbors.”
“I’m still here, and dreaming of what it used to be,” Ford continued. “How nice it was and how nice it can be.”
At the intersection of Clairton’s Miller and Waddell Avenues, Jamar Melvin, a janitorial contractor at the coke works, stood in front of a shuttered, cracked glass storefront. “I heard at first there wasn’t going to be a deal. Then I heard Trump made the deal. Who asked the community about the deal?”
Bottom line: He doesn’t care who made the deal “as long as they take care of the community.” He raised his hand and placed a red “Make America Great Again” cap on his head, assuring it was purely for “fashion.”
A friend of his, smoking a midmorning cigarillo, countered that “they just need to shut it down” and do away with the pollution that clouds the sky.
Melvin called out to a woman passing in a grey hatchback: “What do you have to say about the mill?”
“I have asthma,” The woman in the passenger seat shouted back. “It’s killing us!”
Later, Miriam Maletta stood inside her salon along St. Clair Avenue, her hands lathered and buried in a client’s hair. Her father retired from the Clairton mill in 1986, as the industry was in freefall. Now, she said, “All the people that work down there don’t live in Clairton.”
Maletta said she hasn’t been able or willing to raise her prices, despite wanting to, because most of her clients are on fixed incomes. She hopes the deal might attract businesses, result in more Clairton residents working in the mill and spur housing construction.
Her client, Denine Miller, of the Hill District, said she’d move to Clairton if there were more businesses. “There would be life.”
“I hope and pray,” Maletta said.
At 3 p.m., a young worker emerging from the Clairton works said spirits were high in there since Trump teased the deal. “I’m feelin’ good about it.”
“Things are old and broke in there. I’m glad someone’s putting the money in.”
‘Generational’ change in Mon Valley’s fortunes seen
When West Mifflin Mayor Chris Kelly saw the first indications of a deal on social media, “I said, holy hell!” he recounted Wednesday. “It became immediately overwhelming emotionally. … I took the whole gambit in, it seemed like ten seconds: relief, new business, steel growth, steel stays here in Pittsburgh. Steel stays in the Mon Valley. People continue to work, people continue to feed their families. It was wonderful, and I actually started crying.”
Negotiators from Nippon, U.S. Steel executives and U.S. senators have all sat around the waist-high table in Kelly’s basement garage. The former Homestead police chief has advocated at length for a sale of the Pittsburgh icon to the Nippon.
Later Wednesday the New York Times and The Washington Post were represented in Kelly’s garage, and major television networks the next day — all to hear of what the impending sale might mean to a Mon Valley town that’s hosted U.S. Steel since 1938.
In Kelly’s view, legacy steelmaking in the Mon Valley faced two choices: “Close or be owned by Nippon,” he said. “Nippon is by far the better option.”
Homestead, he said, “had everything” when he served there in the 1970s. Five shoe stores along 8th Avenue. Two Isalys, three furniture stores and five clothing stores along with “68 bars, 14 clubs, 12 speakeasies and three whorehouses,” he claimed.
Then, U.S. Steel’s Homestead mill closed in 1986.
“The money was in the mill. All of a sudden it was gone,” he said. “Absolute devastation.”
People abandoned town. Domestic violence “skyrocketed”. Repossessions and foreclosures, drug abuse, depression and suicides all ensued, Kelly said.
But the mayor believes the deal with Nippon, and the Japanese firm’s pledge to invest and modernize steelmaking in the Mon Valley is a path toward resurgence for the many towns that already experienced that wave of flight and industrial collapse.
“This is going to be generational,” he said. “We’re looking for great things to happen.”
No more ‘sacrificial lambs’
The Breathe Project issued a statement during Trump’s rally, asking whether “these investments address ongoing, negative health impacts from outdated facilities while also addressing associated climate pollution. … At today’s event, company and political leaders failed to provide clear answers.”
On Thursday, Summer Lee, the Democrat from Swissvale who represents parts of the Mon Valley, stood before a banner at Clairton’s middle school, announcing a program that would place solar panels on the building’s rooftop.
“This is the time to focus on communities just like those here in the Mon Valley that deserve these investments and have fought for them and no longer deserve to be sacrificial lambs for industry,” the congresswoman said.
Lee said in an interview that environmental justice is her first concern in a deal between U.S. Steel and Nippon.
“We recognize that steel needs to be made. What we want to ensure is that it’s being made in the most sustainable and cleanest ways possible, with the cleanest technology and those sorts of investments that we’ve seen in other places that we know could be made, but that were denied to the Mon Valley.”
Lee added her hope for a robust community benefits agreement that centers local communities in decision-making, and a plan to ensure workers retain “well-paying union jobs” and the rights from their previous union contract “particularly in a time where Trump and the administration have been attacking our union rights and our labor movement.”
“There is a future for sustainable manufacturing, green manufacturing here in Western Pennsylvania. In fact, I think we’re the perfect location for those types of industries to take off here,” Lee said, adding: “As we clean up the air, it will attract people back. People want to live here. People want to invest in the communities that they’ve known, they’ve grown, and we don’t want to be displaced.”
Editor’s note (6/1): This story has been update with United Steelworkers comment received after initial publication.
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.
The Associated Press contributed.
