U.S. Steel plans to idle Blast Furnace 6 located at Gary Works. It has plans to temporarily lay off up to 6500 workers nationwide including thousands of workers in Northwest Indiana in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The company made an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, saying it planned to issue a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification that it would temporarily lay off up to 6,500 employees nationwide, or more than a third of its total workforce of 16,000 in North America.
U.S.Steel is making drastic cutbacks in response to the COVID-19 crisis that has led to shuttered auto plants and crippled oil companies which are some of its biggest customers across the nation.
U.S. Steel said in the 8-K filing, “The company will temporarily idle #6 blast furnace at Gary Works and #1 blast furnace at Mon Valley Works, effective immediately.” It added, “As a result of reduced blast furnace production, the corporation also will indefinitely idle iron ore production at Keetac after the completion of a planned outage in mid-May and has extended coking times at Clairton Works to align coke production with steel production”.
“The corporation will also adjust production at its Minntac operations in line with the blast furnace idlings. Currently, in its North-America flat-rolled operations, the corporation plans to continue to operate blast furnace #14 at Gary Works, blast furnace #3 at Mon Valley Works, and blast furnace ‘B’ at Granite City Works.”
U.S. Steel President and CEO David Burritt said “Market activity was beginning to improve prior to the emergence of COVID-19 and the sudden changes in global oil and gas markets. As the impacts from these unprecedented market dynamics became apparent, we adjusted our footprint, fortified our balance sheet, and aggressively cut costs. While these decisive actions helped us exceed our first-quarter guidance, we have quickly turned our attention to the second quarter to not only ensure the safety and health of our employees but also to preserve cash and liquidity.”
The company already filed 850 WARNs to workers at Lorain Tubular Operations in Ohio and Lonestar Tubular Operations in Texas, which are idled, and another 550 at its Minnesota Ore Operations, which is partially idled.
Source: nwitimes.com
