As news of the Biden administration’s rejection of the Nippon bid became public yesterday, U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt lashed out at the union, threatening to close down the company’s last remaining Pittsburgh mill, transfer the work to its new non-union mill in Arkansas, and also move its headquarters, which has anchored Pittsburgh’s business community since 1901, to the non-union South as well. (This last threat appears to be Burritt’s way of retaliating against Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who, like virtually every political leader in the region, opposed the pending sale to Nippon.)
Vowing to close his company’s unionized facilities, Burritt appears to be guided by the same anti-union loathing that led Carnegie and his company’s manager in 1892, Henry Clay Frick, to fire all their workers and call in the Pinkertons. His argument that U.S. Steel is hampered by having to abide by contracts with the union doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: From the day he became CEO in May of 2017 until the day before the company received its first offer to be purchased (in this case, by Cleveland-Cliffs) in May of this year, U.S. Steel’s share value rose by a bare 8 percent, while the share value of Cleveland-Cliffs—all of whose mills are unionized under comparable contracts to those at U.S. Steel—rose by 130 percent. That makes a fairly strong case that this difference in company valuation is not due to any "constraints" that the presence of a union supposedly imposes, but rather to the policies and skills of management.
Does rejecting Nippon’s bid on the grounds of national security stand up to scrutiny? That depends, I suppose, on your definition of national security. If national security ultimately depends on having a working class that is financially secure, that isn’t at the mercy of globalized capitalism, that has a real stake in American prosperity, and that isn’t reduced to a dangerous lumpen status by Wall Street maneuvering, then yes—having a workforce whose interests and rights are secured by union contracts is actually a linchpin of long-term national security. In its absence, as we’ve already begun to see, the internal threats to American security and American democracy can readily metastasize.
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