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To prevent a strike and seek favor from the Trump administration, the United Steelworkers (USW) bureaucracy is pushing through another concessions contract for the 1,000 steelworkers at ATI, formerly Allegheny Technologies Incorporated. USW officials announced a last-minute deal right before the February 28 contract expiration and ordered its members to stay on the job.

Details of the six-year deal, which will cover workers at ATI’s unionized factories in Pennsylvania, Ohio and western New York, have not been released. It is even questionable if a final contract has been reached. Instead it is likely the USW bureaucracy is merely pushing through a set of promises whose details may get negotiated in coming months.

Local meetings are being set for this week in which workers will not receive the final contract for review but instead a self-serving “contract summary” put together by union officials with a list of bullet points.

While ATI has been reporting record profits and its stock value has skyrocketed, steelworkers under the terms of the previous USW-backed deal, have seen their wages eaten up by inflation, out-of-pocket health costs rise for fewer benefits and pension benefits reduced. None of these issues will be addressed in any meaningful way in the current contract proposals.

Above all, the settlement will cement in place the loss of over 1,000 jobs that has taken place during the past decade.

The length of the contract—six years—is itself a clear indication that the USW and ATI are seeking to lock in a new round of concessions, changes in work rules and more job cuts.

Allegheny Technologies is a specialty steel manufacturer formerly based in Pittsburgh and now in Texas. During the past decade, the company has increased production for the aerospace and military industries and reduced its capacity for specialty steels used in tools, machine parts and electric transmission.

The overriding concern of the USW bureaucracy was to prevent a walkout by rank-and-file workers and a repeat of the protracted lockouts and strikes in 2015-16 and 2021, which USW officials ultimately sold out. On the evening of February 27, workers at the mills received a text message from the USW stating that they were nearing a contract and instructing members to report for their shifts on Friday. By Friday afternoon, another text was sent out stating that a contract was reached, but provided no new information. The text emphasized that workers were to “continue to report to work as scheduled.”

The agreement of the latest concession contract at ATI follows massive giveaways in each of the last two contracts. In 2015-16, ATI workers were engaged in a bitter seven-month-long lockout. Despite widespread sentiment among rank-and-file steelworkers for extending the strike, the USW isolated the locked-out steelworkers and rammed through a contract that cut health care, pensions and retirement benefits.

It also allowed ATI to slash over 800 jobs—going from 2,200 steelworkers down to 1,300—as it began the process of moving away from its traditional production of specialty steel towards production for the aerospace and military industries.

In 2021, steelworkers struck for over three months and again were left isolated by the United Steelworkers bureaucracy and forced to take more concessions and the cutting of 300 additional jobs.

In justifying both sets of concessions, the USW claimed that the cuts were necessary to “save” the company and that once the company rebounded, it would restore the lost benefits and wages.

Over this period, ATI has continued to make massive profits. Since 2016, when the company stock fell to $10.60 during the seven-month lockout, the stock value has gone up over 500 percent and is now trading near $60 a share.

Since 2020, the company’s revue has grown from $2.98 billion to $4.36 billion in 2024, and net income increased from a $1.57 billion loss in 2020 to over $367 million in 2024.

According to posting on Tipranks.com and Glassdoor.com, executive salaries at ATI include:

• Kimberly A. Fields: President and CEO, has a base salary of $900,000, plus performance incentives and equity awards.

• Robert S. Wetherbee: Executive Chairman, has a base salary of $750,000, plus bonuses.

• Donald P. Newman: EVP, Finance and CFO, has total compensation of $3,085,153

• Elliot S. Davis: Senior Legal Advisor, has total compensation of $2,314,793 

Additional compensation for ATI executives may include cash bonuses, stock, commission and profit sharing.

Rank-and-file ATI workers must take the conduct of this struggle into their own hands by building a rank-and-file committee to organize the defeat of this sellout contract. Before any ratification vote workers must have the full contract and sufficient time to study and discuss it. The rank-and-file committee, made up of the most trusted and militant workers, must oversee the conduct of any vote and tabulation to ensure its integrity.

Decades of bitter experience has proven that the USW bureaucracy does not represent the interests of steelworkers at ATI or for that matter any of the other steelmakers. The number of unionized workers in the steel industry has fallen by 72 percent since 1974, from 512,000 to 142,000, but the assets of the USW bureaucracy have risen to almost $2 billion, according to the union’s most recent filing with the US Labor Department.

For decades, the USW bureaucracy traded away the jobs, pensions and working conditions of the rank and file in exchange for seats on corporate boards, company shares and joint investments. As a result, the highly paid bureaucrats function as another layer of management working with the companies to “control costs” and enforce “labor discipline” as they collect union dues from the membership.

Economic nationalism

Central to the union bureaucracy’s collusion with management has been the ceaseless promotion of economic nationalism, which is aimed at dividing US workers from their class brothers throughout the world and driving them into a fratricidal struggle over who will work for the lowest wages and worst conditions.

Like the United Auto Workers, Teamsters and other unions, the USW bureaucracy has promoted the lie that Trump’s trade war policies are being carried out on behalf of the working class. This provides the fascist president who is attacking immigrants, firing thousands of federal workers and gutting essential social programs with a cover for his war against the world and the working class at home.

The USW—which has members in both the US and Canada—has reacted to Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, not by denouncing the trade war measures which will destroy the jobs of workers internationally and ultimately drag the working class into World War III. Instead, the bureaucracy is calling for the unity of US and Canadian capitalist governments to fight China’s supposed “dumping.”

While opposing the Canadian tariffs, the USW said in a statement last month, “Our union welcomes President Donald Trump’s efforts to contain the global overcapacity that has for too long enabled bad actors like China to flood the global market with its unfairly traded products, resulting in surging imports into the United States, especially from Mexico.”

The USW has backed Trump’s continued opposition to the Nippon Steel buyout of US Steel and support for its takeover by US-based Cleveland Cliffs.

As Biden was leaving office, his administration made good on its pledge to block the sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel but gave the incoming Trump administration the final decision.

The USW, which officially supported Harris in the elections, does not want a strike at ATI which would cut across its support for Trump’s tariffs and his opposition to the Nippon Steel-US Steel buyout.

On Tuesday, Trump’s second round of tariffs went into effect against China, increasing across-the-board tariffs from 10 percent to 20 percent. Likewise on Tuesday, Trump imposed tariffs of 25 percent on goods coming from Canada and Mexico.

The 25 percent tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports announced last month will take effect March 12, setting in motion a full-blown trade war.

Already Canada and China have imposed retaliatory tariffs on US goods and steel executives in Europe met with EU officials to plan their own set of tariffs. “The 18 million tons, which the US is today importing with the exemptions,” Axel Eggert, general director of Eurofer, the European Steel Association, said, “will have to find another place.”

Production is a global process, with manufactured goods and resources the product of the combined labor of workers in many countries. Cars, computers, phones, along with steel, aluminum and other basic materials, are the products of the labor of workers across national borders and often continents.

The idea that manufacturing can be “rolled back” to a time when it was based in a single nation is a myth and represents a regression in the productivity of humanity. It is the capitalist nation-state system that is now turning to trade war and ultimately world war.

The USW bureaucracy is concerned not with the interests of workers, but of US capitalism. Its adoption of “America First” is aimed at lining workers up behind the ruling class first for trade war and then world war.

A real fight in defense of jobs anywhere in the world requires the international unity of the working class on the basis of a common strategy. Only through global actions can the working class face off against ATI, US Steel, Cleveland Cliffs, Nippon Steel and their wealthy shareholders, who are waging a war for profits and market share all over the world.

Workers must reject the slogan of “America First” in favor of the slogan, “Workers of the World Unite!” The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) is fighting to build a world movement in opposition to the nationalist poison promoted by corporate politicians and union bureaucrats in every country.

To join the fight for rank-and-file power, fill out the form below.