PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — Six months after fading industrial giant U.S. Steel announced it was looking for a buyer and three months after Nippon Steel, a Japanese steel company, agreed to buy it, it appears that President Joe Biden has finally understood the political impact the sale could have on his reelection and decided to weigh in.
“U.S. Steel has been an iconic American steel company for more than a century, and it is vital for it to remain an American steel company that is domestically owned and operated,” the president said in a statement released by the White House.
For months, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) — who lives across the street from the hulking Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock, Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, which began operation in 1875 — has been strident in his opposition to this acquisition.
In December, Fetterman took to the rooftop of his home, a converted car dealership, with the mill in the background, and released a video of his vow to block the multibillion-dollar sale to the Japanese company, calling the mere idea of it “outrageous” and decrying U.S. Steel for selling itself “to a foreign nation and company.”
Fetterman added in the video posted to X, “Steel is always about security, and I am committed to anything I can do, from using my platform or my position, in order to block this.”
The announced sale of the company came 123 years after it was founded in 1901 by Carnegie, Charles Schwab, Elbert Gary, and J.P. Morgan. When it was launched, it was the largest business enterprise of its time.
That year alone, it supplied 70% of all steel produced in the country.
While steel’s glory days ended several decades ago thanks in part to automation, international trade deals, regulations, and inadequate investment, plenty of labor union workers are still employed in the industry, and those labor union workers who are not still have deep ties to the identity that the U.S. steelworker union represents.
In the past three weeks, Biden administration trade decisions cost over 900 steelworkers their jobs at the Cleveland-Cliffs Weirton Works, and at the Cleveland-Cliffs Butler Works, 1,500 jobs are now in jeopardy thanks to a Biden administration Department of Energy rule that will cause them to shut down.
Then, there is the Biden administration decision from January ordering a pause on all liquefied natural gas exports, which has a wide-ranging impact on the billion-dollar industry here in Pennsylvania, as well as Ohio, Texas, and Louisiana.
Democrats, aware of the impact this was having on working-class voters, sounded the alarm last week when Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Bob Casey (D-PA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Fetterman called on Biden to reverse course and oppose three proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules that would devastate the domestic steel industry and threaten jobs.
The senators said the proposed regulations “would not promote environmental sustainability within the American steel industry” but instead result in more steel production moving overseas to countries like China.
“As currently written, these three rules pose a threat to our steel industry’s global economic competitiveness while yielding minimal environmental benefits — benefits that can be achieved through other means,” the senators wrote in a statement.
“We implore you and your Administration to reassess each of these rules and use its discretion to work with impacted stakeholders — including affected companies and labor unions representing workers at steel facilities across the U.S. — to achieve feasible regulations that preserve the economic competitiveness of American steel,” they added.
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At the heart of Biden’s decision to come out against this deal is politics. Biden already struggles with non-college-educated white working-class voters, but a jarring New York Times/Siena poll released this past weekend shows him losing the historical edge all Democrats have held since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with black working-class voters.
In 2020, Biden won 72% of those voters. Today, the New York Times/Siena poll shows him barely leading among nonwhite voters 47% to 41%.
