‘CORPORATE GREED’

[East of Canton, Ohio, is a small steel mill
ownedby a Pittsburgh company called
Allegheny Technologies Inc. (A.T.I.)]

“A.T.I. had been requiring some of ~
the hundred and thirty workers at the
mill to put in twelve-hour shifts or
seven-day work weeks. Families were
showing the strain. In June [2015], A.T.I.
offered the union representing the employees,
the United Steelworkers, a new
contract, asking for a hundred and forty-
five concessions. The company claimed
that it was under pressure from foreign
and nonunion US. competitors. However, executive
pay had risen more than fifty per cent during 2014,
and the total compensation of the chief executive
Richard Harshman, had risen seventy

per cent, to nearly eight million dollars

in spite of the company's poor performance.
(Nearly half of A.T. I. 's shareholders had voted
against the compensation packages.)

" ‘I read those hundred forty-five items
and got sick to my stomach,’ Kurt Reynolds, a burly
maintenance worker with a Hemingway beard, said.

I told my wife, 'If this is what they want, they're
trying to break the union.’

“In August [2015], A.T. I. made its final offer
Before the United Steelworkers could bring it to
a vote, plant managers escorted employees from the mill and
brought in replacement workers. The lockout began. Union
workers were girding themselves for a long battle. ‘It ain t
nothing but corporate greed,’ Rick Jones,
who has worked at the mill for twenty-two years, said.”

Packer, George, “The Republican Class War,” pp: 26-34 (34), The New Yorker,
November 9, 2015.