By Rosemary Bezy, Mike Stout, Patricia DeMarco, Willard Jones, Mike Fallon and Matt Mehalik

Silence. Total lack of leadership. It has been two months since United States Steel Corp. announced it was investing $3 billion in Arkansas for its advanced steelmaking facilities, and not one regional leader has said a word about it.

This silence embodies cynical political calculation to avoid questions about how we ended up here: Abandonment of Mon Valley communities and its highly skilled, unionized, manufacturing workforce. 

U.S. Steel will shift its investments to a right-to-work state with 600 nonunion workers to replace the same steelmaking capacity in the Mon Valley, where 3,500 workers face an uncertain future, while U. S. Steel also starts exiting its pension obligations.

The silence insults generations of workers who sacrificed their lives to build the infrastructure of our country and the foundation of our region and its historic prosperity. We are steelworkers, retired steelworkers, and multigenerational descendants of steelworkers. We know the importance of good-paying union jobs. Unfortunately, we are familiar with this treatment. We are living through the latest episode in U.S. Steel’s more than 50-year history of broken promises: A slow-motion exit from their professed “home” and “family” in the Mon Valley, like what happened when the company spent $6.4 billion in 1981 to acquire Marathon Oil instead of investing in Mon Valley facilities as promised. This whiplash of broken promises leaves a toxic legacy in the Mon Valley.

It is time to go in a different direction. We want investments in the Mon Valley and its world class, highly skilled workforce. We support high-tech manufacturing for the future. 

We are proposing a plan that unites workers and that communities can build upon: 1. A vision centering on improving the health of communities and workers, with reliable leadership and good-faith partners. 2. A commitment respecting residents’ and workers’ rights to clean air and water and a healthy environment. 3. Investments in people: Workers and communities, not in corporations that harm communities. 4. Reliable, family-sustaining jobs in industries — whether steel or not — that help, not hurt, their local communities. 5. Solutions addressing short-term air pollution problems and long-term climate necessities lacking in past and current proposed plans for the Mon Valley.

In the Mon Valley, we have the skills, tools and resources to become a center for manufacturing for the new economy of the 21st century. We need to revive the collaborative spirit that built America. 

We want a major manufacturer to embrace this golden opportunity: Be part of the solution. Heal the community from past abandonment. Clean up the environmental mess.

Do right by loyal union workers. Build America’s next generation industries through advanced technology and innovation. 

The emerging clean economy needs skills we already have in the Mon Valley. If not a modern steel operation run on renewable energy, we want modernized manufacturing that replaces declining industries with next-generation products: Electric vehicles, energy storage systems, solar systems, wind systems, a modern electric grid and alternatives to single-use plastics. Pittsburgh can lead in green chemistry and circular materials production systems.

Good union jobs can become the heart of the transformation of our economy. A better future is within reach if we demand it. Join us to end the silence and disrespect.

Mike Stout is former grievance chair, USWA Local 1397, Homestead Steel Works, and president, Izaak Walton League of America Allegheny County Chapter; Rose Bezy is a Clairton steelworker, USW Local 1557

Other contributors and signers to this viewpoint are:

Willard Jones, Clairton Steelworker, USW Local 1557

Matthew Mehalik, Breathe Project Director, descendant of three generations of Mon Valley steelworkers

Patricia M. DeMarco, Ph.D., steel workers’ daughter and veteran father and mother in AFT and Allegheny Administrators Union; and granddaughter of the UE and PA RR unions

Mark Fallon, former Clairton Steelworker, Steel Valley teacher, Munhall Borough Council member