Tag: U.S. Steel layoffs

US Steel to shutter Detroit plant and lay off 1,545 workers after Trump brags he ‘saved’ industry

AlterNet logoU.S. Steel Corp. plans to permanently idle a giant plant in the Detroit area and lay off up to 1,545 workers as steelmakers face large financial losses despite President Donald Trump’s boasts that he “saved” the steel industry.

U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt praised Trump’s tariffs on imported steel after the company announced it would rehire workers and restart two blast furnaces last year. Earlier this year, Trump bragged that he “not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs” with his steel tariffs.

Just months later, U.S. Steel announced that it would idle a plant outside of Detroit and lay off as many as 1,545 employees, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The company already laid off 200 Michigan workers earlier this year.

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US Steel lays off Michigan workers a week after Trump bragged ‘business is thriving’

AlterNet logoJust last week, Donald Trump was bragging about the success of his steel tariffs. This week, U.S. Steel is laying off workers in Michigan—temporarily, but for as long as six months.

“Steel was dead. Your business was dead. Okay? I don’t want to be overly crude. Your business was dead. And I put a little thing called ‘a 25 percent tariff’ on all of the dumped steel all over the country. And now your business is thriving” Trump said, in the same Monaca, Pennsylvania, speech at which he had a coerced audience of workers told they’d lose pay if they didn’t attend. “And I’ll tell you what,” he added later, “Those steel mills—U.S. Steel and all of them, all of them—they’re expanding all over the place. New mills. New expansions. We hadn’t have—we didn’t have a new mill built in 30 years, and now we have many of them going up.”

This is, of course, false. There are not “many” new steel mills going up (and on top of it, there had been at least one built within the last 30 years). U.S. Steel is investing $1 billion in its Mon Valley Works facilities, but there’s no guarantee of new jobs there.

View the complete August 20 article by Laura Clawson from the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.