US Steel is shuttering production at a mill in November, but its hundreds of workers will keep their jobs – for now – thanks to an agreement the company reached with the Trump administration.
US Steel will stop producing steel at its Granite City, Illinois, mill at the end of October, but the 800 workers at the plant will stay on the job, maintaining equipment, until at least 2027. That’s due to the structure of the deal the company reached with President Donald Trump to allow its purchase by Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel. The agreement included various job protections and production guarantees.
“US Steel will optimize its footprint by focusing on producing and processing steel slabs at the Mon Valley (Pennsylvania) Works and Gary (Indiana) Works, and reducing slab consumption at Granite City Works,” the company said in a statement to CNN Monday. “As a result of this decision, US Steel will not lay off any Granite City Works employees nor adjust their pay rate.”
The company added that it would not idle the plant, and keep it in an operational state.
As for what the workers will be doing without any steel to produce, US Steel said it will continue some ancillary operations and that the facility will be “maintained by employees so production could resume quickly if the situation changes.”
Trump promised at a May rally at a US Steel mill outside of Pittsburgh that the deal, and new 50% tariffs on steel imports, would be good for US Steel employees.
“The deal got better and better and better for the workers. I’m going to be watching over it. It’s going to be great,” Trump said at the time. “They’re going to be here for a long time… There will be no outsourcing and no layoffs whatsoever.”
But the clock is ticking. US Steel’s deal only blocks it from closing Granite City and laying off workers until June of 2027.
The White House did not have an immediate comment on the closing plans, nor did the United Steelworkers union. While USW locals in Pennsylvania supported the agreement with Nippon, the larger USW organization objected to the deal.
“Issuing press releases and making political speeches is easy,” the union said in a statement after the rally in May. “Binding commitments are hard. The devil is always in the details, and that is especially true with a bad actor like Nippon Steel that has again and again violated our trade laws, devastating steel communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.”
The plant in question has 700 hourly workers represented by the USW and about 100 salaried staff. But that is a fraction of the 2,000 hourly workers it used to employ when the plant had its own blast furnaces to make steel from raw materials such as iron and coke.
Granite City Works first blast furnace was shut in 2019, and its remaining one closed in 2023. Since then, it has only processed slabs made at other mills.
