NORTH BRADDOCK, Pennsylvania — Scott Buckiso is beaming the way you do when an underdog accomplishes something everyone around them predicted was never going to happen.
Buckiso, along with thousands of steelworkers, their family members, and members of the community, is walking around the gravel parking lot that sits along the banks of the Monongahela River. All around him are dozens of massive industrial buildings that house blast furnaces, a slab caster, two top-blown basic oxygen process vessels, a vacuum degasser, and a ladle metallurgy facility.
They are all part of the iconic Edgar Thomson Works, or ET, a steelmaking facility that was established by Andrew Carnegie and named after the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, some say, to curry favor for support of his enterprises.
Steam rises out of a stack as the long, long, short, long whistle of a Union Railroad momentarily cuts off access to the parking lot as it moves materials such as iron ore, coke, and finished steel.
It is ET’s 150th birthday, and just about everyone in attendance here wasn’t sure the famed facility would reach this milestone.
Last December, Buckiso, the senior vice president and chief manufacturing officer of U.S. Steel, was standing outside the Clairton Works plant at a rally filled with union steelworkers. It was one day after Bloomberg News reported that then-President Joe Biden would block the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel on national security grounds.
The steelworkers and plant officials pulled together a makeshift rally. Buckisco made a direct plea to Biden, saying the transaction with Nippon was the only hope to preserve and grow their integrated steel-making and the union jobs that supported the process.
Buckisco’s plea fell on deaf ears. By Jan. 6, Biden made it official, blocking the sale and crushing the hopes of the union steelworkers. Unless you lived here, you really have no idea how bad that news was that day. America’s first billion-dollar company, a company that was the symbol of the exceptionalism and grit the country has stood for since our founding, would likely not survive the news.
Eight months later, Buckisco strides from his vehicle with his daughter in tow, looks around at the billowing white tents giving shade to picnic tables, a DJ playing working-class rock and roll anthems to the thousands of steelworkers and their families, and smiles broadly.
The good guys won. Finally. And Buckisco and everyone else here are on top of the world since President Donald Trump came to the Mon Valley Irvin Works in late May to announce the deal with Nippon and U.S. Steel.
By June, the merger of U.S. Steel with Japan‘s Nippon Steel was finalized after the companies signed a national security agreement with the United States and accepted a golden share arrangement.
“It means hope. It means the future. It means there’s going to be potentially another 150 years of people just like me in this community that will have the same opportunities, same opportunity to put their kids through school, support their families,” he says, then pauses and looks at his teenage daughter, adding, “Maybe she stays living around here. I was telling her on the way down, maybe she’ll be our fifth generation.”
Buckisco grew up in Duquesne, where the once mighty Duquesne Works dominated the skyline of the working-class city. His greatest memory was of his father and grandfather walking down the steep hill of Catherine Street to work together at the mill. His father was in management, his grandfather was in the union.
“I started as a management associate in 1990 at the Irvin Works, worked there for about 13 years, up through the ranks. I was a shift manager for 10 years, and then I had an opportunity to work at other facilities, then came back home to work here,” he said.
“It is a great day. It’s a great day. Not only for Edgar Thomson, but all of the Mon Valley and the communities, especially with the transaction that we just had,” he said of the deal Trump made between the two steel giants.
Patricia Kazimer is watching the thousands lining up to tour ET, a rare treat for many family members of steelworkers to see what their loved ones do every day, but also for the members of the community. There is a sea of orange safety jackets and royal blue hard hats.
Kazimer is a fourth-generation U.S. Steel employee whose family came to the U.S. in the great migration wave of the 20th century to fill the manufacturing jobs.
“My great-grandfather came over from Slovakia, that was my mom’s side of the family. And then my dad’s side of the family, that great-grandfather came over from Slovakia. They both worked at U.S. Steel and Homestead Works,” Kazimer explains.
“I grew up in Homestead. Literally, I could see the mill from where I lived. And so I had both great-grandfathers and then my grandfather worked at Homestead Works for 42 years as a hooker — he hooked the ladles — and my dad worked at U.S. Steel as well,” she explained.
Kazimer said she began her career at ET in 2011.
“I was the plant admin for the plant manager. And then a few years later, I took on all the Mon Valley Works Environmental,” she explained, adding today she is working at the iconic downtown Pittsburgh skyscraper, which is the tallest building in Appalachia.
“U.S. Steel is such a great place to work. I love my job every day since I’ve started here,” she said, a sentiment repeated over and over again, no matter where you worked for the company.
Everyone discussed how the new investments from Nippon will build the next generation of steel. They were also excited about the preparations to make new advancements in technology and steel, and how that will build the future for the next generations.
Plant manager Jon Olszewski said people in attendance on Sunday first experienced a driving tour of the hundreds of acres of the plant.
“Then they saw the blast furnaces and all where the raw materials come in, as well as our powerhouse, where we generate electricity, and then a walking tour of the basic oxygen process, which is where the steel making starts,” he explained.
They also saw their casting machine, where the liquid steel is formed into a cast slab, which was the most exciting moment of a non-stop, exciting tour.
As someone who has watched this industry die and all of the communities, churches, fraternal clubs, mom-and-pop stores, and families that have either splintered or closed, or stubbornly refused to move in the hopes that someday their worlds would be prosperous again, the emotions are difficult to convey.
Few chronicled these losses in the news in real time. It wasn’t until 2016 that they tried to understand why Trump was appealing to Rust Belt cities across the Midwest. Then the reporting was more anthropological than curious.
The population of Pittsburgh, where mills dotted the shoreline of the rivers, collapsed by half between the end of the 1960s and today, with much of that outmigration being young people looking for opportunity as the mills and manufacturing began to collapse.
Kurt Barshick, the vice president for the Mon Valley Works, which includes ET, Irvin Works, and the Clairton Works, said being able to have this day come to life is overwhelming for him when he thinks about what might have happened.
“It means everything. I mean, you think about this plant, it’s been in business for 150 years, and with the investments we’re going to have, the next generation of steelworkers, they’re going to have secure jobs here. Not only secure jobs, but the jobs of the future, putting in high technology, really advanced steel making,” he said.
MAGA IS PREMATURELY CELEBRATING TARIFFS
Barshick said it is important to place this in the context of what was and what can be.
“It’s really exciting to think about the past workers that have worked here, our current families and friends that work at our mills, and then the future, the children that are here are going to have jobs.”