Idled RG Steelworkers Rally for Their Jobs
WARREN, Ohio – Bill Moss has seen this happen before.
He was a steelworker at the McDonald Works of for U.S. Steel Corp. in the 1970s and ‘80s, and he recalls the day the managers directed him to clean out his locker and pack his belongings because the plant was closing.
"It hit me hard," Moss said. "Now, I'm going through the same thing again."
Moss and 50 other steelworkers represented by Local 1375 of the United Steelworkers held a rally across the street from RG Steel to send a message to the new owners of the plant: find a buyer or investors, restart the mill, and recall the roughly 1,200 employees on layoff and uncertain about their future.
These workers also stand to lose their supplemental unemployment pay and benefits effective Saturday.
RG Steel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy May 31 and has since shuttered its steelmaking complexes in Warren and Sparrows Point near Baltimore.
A U.S. bankruptcy court in Delaware awarded provisional approval for C.J. Betters Enterprises to buy the Warren mill for $16 million. A bankruptcy judge must still give final approval for the sale pending the outcome of an easement dispute with a neighboring coke plant owned by ArcelorMittal.
Earlier this month, Betters' CEO, Charles J. Betters, said his company would "figure out a way to start this mill," should the economy improve and the company gets help from the state of Ohio.
However, the workers rallying outside the plant remain skeptical.
"It's heartbreaking," said Phil Spisak, an employee in the machine shop. "We're hearing they're starting to tear stuff out from the hot-strip mill and back."
Under the agreement reached in bankruptcy, Spisak said, Betters isn't to touch the equipment in the mill for another nine months.
As far as his membership knows, Betters has not found any investors willing to put money in the mill.
The key is to "winterize" critical equipment in the plant so it could be restarted, Spisak said. "We want this mill to run. If they don't winterize it in the next couple of months, if they don't get people back to work, the blast furnace will never run again."
That would effectively bring an end to more than 100 years of steelmaking at that site. "We're just trying to save jobs,” he said. “We've lost enough jobs in this community. We've lost enough jobs in this country. It's time that somebody takes a stand."
RG Steel purchased the Warren, Sparrows Point mill and the former Wheeling-Pitt complex in West Virginia from Russian steel conglomerate Severstal last year for $1.2 billion. Ira Rennert and his company, Renco Group, owned the mill – then called WCI Steel – during the 1980s through 2003, when that company filed Chapter 11.
Rennert then formed RG Steel and purchased the mill from Severstal last year.
John Siwicki, who worked at the mill more than 40 years and is the fourth generation from his family to work there, said that the Warren mill has always been profitable and enjoyed strong support from its customers all over the country.
"For it to go down the way it did is very questionable. This is a moneymaking plant," Siwicki stated. "I think a lot of money flew out of here and went to other plants and that created a domino effect."
RG Steel's Sparrows Point mill was sold to a liquidator for $72 million through bankruptcy court earlier this month.
"We're just looking to promote for a new operator," he said. "That's the bottom line."
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.