Burns pledges fight to keep U.S. Steel in domestic hands
Says proposed sale to Japanese company bad for workers, national security
Rep. Frank Burns December 20, 2023 | 9:27 AM
EBENSBURG, Dec. 20 – Citing preservation of a robust domestic steel industry as a national security concern, state Rep. Frank Burns, chairman of the House Steel Caucus, is calling for stiff and unified Congressional opposition to the takeover of iconic U.S. Steel by a Japanese company.
Burns, D-Cambria, also believes the proposed sale to Nippon Steel will result in the further loss of good-paying union jobs in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the Northeast and Midwest, as high-end, blast furnace steel production is replaced by more imported Japanese steel.
“As a nation and as an economy, we cannot sit idly by and watch our steel industry be hollowed out to the point of total dependence on foreign supply,” Burns said. “That recipe would prove disastrous to U.S. workers and families, puts us at the mercy of foreign whims, and curtails our ability to manufacture tanks and other military hardware in the event they are needed.”
Burns said he plans to craft a state House resolution calling on Congress to intercede in the proposed $14.9 billion sale, and he will work to rally bipartisan support for it in Harrisburg.
“Here’s the bottom line: We have to be able to make new steel in this country, in case of times of war,” Burns said. “One of the reasons we were able to win World War II against Japan was that our industrial might allowed us not just to outfight them, but to outproduce them – and that important advantage started with steel.
“Given the dangers we see in the world today, particularly in the Russian-Ukrainian and the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts, I for one am not willing to watch our steel industry go quietly into the night. I intend to put up a fight to keep it.”
Burns, who has been working with California U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna on a federal initiative to revive steel production in Johnstown, said of the world’s top 15 steel companies, China has nine and the U.S. has none.
Burns added that in the 1950s, when Johnstown was thriving, the U.S. made 50 percent of the world’s steel – a number that’s now down to 2 or 3 percent.
“Nippon Steel swallowing up U.S. Steel does nothing to help reverse this dangerous trend,” Burns said. “In fact, it’s just another stick in the collective eye of U.S. workers that puts our nation in an even more precarious position on the world stage.”