USW@Work: Volume 18, Issue 1

When Rich Schiavoni tells people that he is a member of the United Steelworkers union, they often will ask him what he makes.

“I make college students,” is the answer he has at the ready, knowing that isn’t necessarily the response people expect.

“I’m constantly blown away by the diversity of what USW members do and what they make,” said Schiavoni, a part-time history and political science professor at Point Park University in Pittsburgh who grew up around family members who worked in Western Pennsylvania’s steel industry.

“They worked in the mills, they worked on the railroad, they were all in a union,” he said. “I’m proud that I get to carry on that tradition in a different way.”

Teiya Hangsleben got involved in the labor movement before she was even old enough to sign a union card. At the age of 12, she started helping her father, a local union officer, write grievances.

So when the USW offered rankand- file members like Hangsleben the opportunity to be trained as organizers and put those skills to use in workplaces across North America to grow the union, she “jumped at it,” she said.

Hangsleben attended training sessions alongside her USW siblings last spring in Ohio, then hit the ground running over the summer, helping the USW achieve its largest industrial organizing victory in 19 years, bringing 700 members at the Bobcat plant in Bismarck, N.D., into the union.

Kenny Stitt was only 32 when he lost his life in a workplace tragedy on Oct. 12, 2021.

He left behind a wife and two young kids, as well as hundreds of members of his extended USW family, who made sure that his spouse and his children would never have to face such a devastating loss alone.

In addition to his Local 1016 siblings, one of the first USW members to respond following Stitt’s death at the NLMK steel facility in Farrell, Pa., was Duronda Pope, who oversees the union’s Emergency Response Team (ERT).