By KEVIN NEVERS

Some 1,400 members of United Steelworkers Local 6787 voted unanimously on Wednesday to authorize International President Leo Gerard to call a strike against ArcelorMittal if a new contract has not been reached when the current one expires at midnight Sunday.

“Not one person said no,” Local 6787 President Paul Gipson told the Chesterton Tribune after the vote. At around 7 p.m. Gipson was aware of one other unanimous vote--that one taken by the membership of Local 9231, which represents 400 steelworkers employed at ArcelorMittal’s I/N Tek I/n Kote facility in New Carlisle, Ind.—but he expressed confidence that the remaining 14 locals would similarly vote to authorize a strike.

“I doubt if any of the locals wouldn’t vote to strike,” Gipson said. “Because most of these guys were around when the steelmakers started going bankrupt. They witnessed the crisis. The lived it. They saw retirees who lost their health care and retirees who saw their payments cut when the (Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation) took over their pensions. And they know (Lakshmi Mittal) is doing pretty well right now.”

Today Gipson and the presidents of the other locals were returning to Pittsburgh to join the union’s negotiating team, and he said that talks would continue until the bloody end, until a new contract was reached or else the deadline. “I’d like to say I feel good about Saturday, that this could be all done and finalized, but I just don’t know.”

Gipson did say that, strike or no strike, “it will take years to repair the damage done” to the relationship between the union and the company. “Everyone I’ve talked to is mad. They all know retirees who say ‘I’m tired of asking my kids to help me. I’m tired of having to decide whether to eat or buy my prescription meds.’”

Meanwhile, preparations for a strike continue. “We started banking the coke ovens and shutting down the blast furnaces,” Gipson said, although he added that the outage should have begun days ago. “In 1993 we were going to strike Bethlehem and we started taking the furnaces down well in advance of the deadline. It’s a slow process to do it properly. You run the risk of damaging things if you do it too quickly. And it wouldn’t have done anyone any good if a blast furnace was damaged and then a contract was reached.”

Now, Gipson said, the delay in beginning the outage is simply a “sign of how these negotiations are going.” But, should the process extend beyond the deadline, he promised to release enough people to finish it.

Steel Supply

If push comes to shove and the USW does strike ArcelorMittal, Gipson predicted that, as voracious as the demand currently is for steel, the action “will create a nationwide shortage” of product. “China is still buying everything it can. So are the developing countries. The market is bullish. The order books are full.”

Gipson was unable to say, on the other hand, how full the order books might be for ArcelorMittal’s most strategically vital product: the military-grade plate manufactured chiefly by the company’s 140-inch and 206-inch mills at Coatesville, Pa., and the 110-inch Steckel mill at Conshohocken, Pa., and to a lesser extent at its other plate mills, the 160-inch and 110-inch ones at Burns Harbor, for instance, and the 160-inch at Gary Works, acquired in 2993 by International Steel Group (ISG). “Plate’s a huge business right now,” he acknowledged. “It’s selling at $1,450 per ton.”

Gipson did say that, with war being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strike of the U.S. military’s primary supplier of plate—in 2005 as much as 85 percent of all the plate supplied to the Defense Department’s contractors was produced by ISG’s mills—“comes at a terrible time.” And, he observed, the union leadership is well aware of the implications of the Military Selective Service Act (MSSA), originally enacted as the Selective Service Act of 1948. “We talked about that.”

Although the greatest part of the MSSA establishes the workings of the selection service system, in an odd provision which reads almost like an afterthought it also specifically authorizes the U.S. president to order the seizure of any mill whose owner declines to fill or otherwise to prioritize any order for steel placed by any defense contractor.

Apparently a U.S. president has invoked that provision only once. On April 8, 1952—at the height of the Korean War—President Truman instructed his Secretary of Commerce to seize and operate most of the country’s mills in anticipation of a nationwide strike called by the United Steelworkers of America. Among his reasons, as stipulated in Executive Order 10340: “the weapons and other materials needed by our armed forces . . . are produced to a great extent in this country, and steel is an indispensable component of substantially all of such weapons and materials”; and “a continuing and uninterrupted supply of steel is also indispensable to the maintenance of the economy of the United States, upon which our military strength depends.”

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, though, Truman got the MSSA wrong and in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer the court vacated his executive order, on the grounds that he had exceeded both his statutory and constitutional authority and that seizure was an improper means to resolve labor disputes and work stoppages.

While the precedent would appear clearly to favor labor, Gipson did not discount altogether the chance of a similar federal intervention should a strike go into the long days. “There’s a possibility that could happen and we know that,” he said. “Mittal’s got more friends in Washington, D.C., and the Bush Administration than we do.”

Posted 8/28/2008