What The Hell America!

The homepage of JSW Steel USA’s website features wind turbines and the tagline “Sustainable steel for a stronger tomorrow.” They also brag that they have “the most energy-efficient and lowest carbon-emitting method of steelmaking” and are “sowing seeds for a greener future.” For their greening efforts, they’ve received $43.5 million from the Department of Energy to improve their Mingo Junction, Ohio, facility, which produces steel slabs used in offshore wind construction.

This same facility recently unionized after a 117–105 victory in its NLRB election tallied on March 7, leading to 248 new members for the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied & Industrial and Service Workers International Union (USW). Despite the green, ethical image portrayed on its website, the union says JSW has fought the union by hiring an outside attorney and union-busting consultants, holding captive-audience meetings, and even firing three union supporters the Monday after the votes were counted. Union supporters say they have been harassed and threatened throughout; one recently received text messages from anti-union people that “we’re gonna kick your ass in the parking lot.”

This is the third election that USW has run at the Mingo Junction facility; the previous one was lost by one vote. Since then, there’s been some significant turnover but the same complaints, even after management changes and promises to improve the working conditions at the plant. This last election campaign really only kicked off a few months ago, but much like the United Auto Workers’ win at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, this effort was years in the making.

According to director of organizing Maria Somma, USW has been focused on building its organizing capacity to take on more large industrial campaigns like the one at JSW:

Over the last five years, [we’ve been] retraining and reskilling staff, and our average unit size has vastly increased. We won at the University of Pittsburgh, starting with winning for 3,300 faculty members. But we’re an industrial union — everybody in, nobody out. So we had campaigns also with over 6,000 staff members and over 2,000 graduate students. The University of Pittsburgh is the second-largest employer in Allegheny County, and we figured out how to tackle those big numbers. Now we represent 12,000 workers there.

At the same time that we were building that muscle at the University of Pittsburgh, we were also organizing in Bismarck, North Dakota, at the Bobcat plant [which manufactures farm and construction equipment], where we recently [in 2022] won for 800 workers. North Dakota hadn’t seen an industrial win of that size in decades. When we won at Blue Bird [the Blue Bird Corporation, which manufactures buses] for 1,500 workers [in April 2023], Georgia also hadn’t seen an industrial win like that in decades. At the same time, we won close to 600 miners in the Iron Range of Minnesota. Again, that size — it’s winning to scale.

Somma stressed that “there’s a big difference between organizing a large industrial shop and organizing in the service sector.” Given the threats of relocating industrial plants that steelworkers are under as well as the physical intimidation that they face in an organizing drive, convincing workers to risk their livelihood takes a great number of patient conversations. With their internal retraining and capacity building, Somma feels like USW is well-positioned “to help workers feel their own power and harness that power” and to continue winning large shops.