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January 12, 2024
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
The International Union, along with Local Unions 1899, 1938, 2695, and 2695-6, today filed grievances to enforce our rights under the successorship clause in our ongoing fight to enforce our Basic Labor Agreements (BLAs) with USS.
The grievances were filed at Step 2 and allege that USS violated our contracts in a number of ways when it entered into a sale agreement with an affiliate of Nippon Steel Corporation in December.
Talk is Cheap
We know talk is cheap, especially coming from greedy corporations.
That is why we negotiated successorship rights into our BLAs to protect our contracts and our members in precisely this situation. These rights are enforceable guarantees that a company seeking to buy our facilities cannot shirk its responsibilities to workers and retirees.
Commitments like pensions, profit sharing, capital expenditures, retiree health care and more are all part of the compensation we negotiated in bargaining our contract. Anyone who wants to acquire our facilities must have both the intent and the financial capacity to honor them.
USS Ignoring its Obligations
Instead, it’s clear that USS and Nippon designed an agreement that prioritizes only corporate interests.
Rather than reaching out to the union, they decided that Nippon Steel North America, a Houston-based holding company, would assume our labor, pension, retiree, and other agreements.
However, we did not agree to this arrangement, nor do we have any information about the financial wherewithal of this holding company to actually stand behind all of the obligations of our existing agreements.
The USW is prepared to continue this grievance process all the way to its conclusion as we hold management accountable for trying to cash in by selling out American Steelworkers and its shocking disregard for our contracts and its dedicated workforce.
As ever, we will be in contact as we have more information to share.