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US Steel Announces Layoffs In Michigan, Hurting Trump’s Claims Of An Industry Revival

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Mary Margaret Olohan Social Issues Reporter
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The United States Steel Corporation plans to lay off fewer than 200 workers at a Michigan facility, according to the company’s filings with the state of Michigan.

A Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed Aug. 5 reveals the United States Steel Corporation will lay off less than 200 workers at the corporation’s Great Lakes facility. This follows the company’s decision to stop production at the facility in June, according to Reuters.

News of the layoffs comes after President Donald Trump said last week at Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex in Monaca, Pennsylvania that his 25% tariff on foreign imports helped change the steel business from “dead” to “thriving.”

“And, by the way, steel — steel was dead,” Trump said August 13. (RELATED: July Jobs Report: 164,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment Remains At 3.7 Percent)

“And I put a little thing called ‘a 25 percent tariff’ on all of the dumped steel all over the country. And now your business is thriving. Probably there’s few businesses that have gone proportionately up like steel and aluminum.”

” And I’ll tell you what: Those steel mills — U.S. Steel and all of them, all of them — they’re expanding all over the place,” Trump added. “New mills. New expansions. We hadn’t have — we didn’t have a new mill built in 30 years, and now we have many of them going up.”

While domestic steel prices rose immediately after Trump’s tariffs, they have also fallen as auto and farm machinery sectors weaken demand, according to Reuters. Hot-rolled coil prices have fallen almost 37% since 2018 and U.S. Steel’s stock price dropped 73% since March 2018.

Layoffs may also occur at the Gary Works facility in Indiana, according to an official at the United Steelworkers union. But a U.S. Steel spokeswoman said the corporation is not expecting “any employment level changes” currently at the Indiana plant, according to Reuters.

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