Solidarity Rally for Granite City Steelworkers

Name: Solidarity Rally for Granite City Steelworkers
Start: 2025-09-20T14:30:00-05:00
Location: Civic Park

Schedule

Sat, 20 Sep, 2025 at 02:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Civic Park | Granite City, IL

The United Steelworkers President, Dave McCall and USW District 7 Director, Mike Millsap will be holding a rally in Granite City, Illinois to support members of Local Union 1899 and to protest the recent decision to cease operations at Granite City.
Saturday September 20th, 2025. The rally will start at 2:30pm CST. There will numerous speakers including @Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski. The rally attendees will gather at 1319 Niedringhaus Avenue Granite City Illinois. We will then march two blocks to the Historic Labor Temple USW Local1899 Union Hall. LET'S PACK THE PARK!!!!
After 131 years, the tens of thousands of generational jobs and the seven multiplier jobs providing upward mobility will, apparently, soon come to an unceremonious end. Granite City Steelworkers, arguably have been more involved in campaigns to save domestic steel over the past three decades than even U.S Steel and all the affected steelmakers involvement.
USW Local 18999 has been instrumental in strengthening trade enforcement beginning over 30 years ago to save the industry yet this is how U.S. Steel rewards the hard work done that has resulted in the companies recording exceptional record profits.
Nippon Steel "merged" with U.S. Steel earlier this year as part of a shell game orchestrated by the administration to comply with the President's vow to keep U.S. Steel American owned.
Thyssenkrupp built a $3.7 billion dollar state of art steel processing plant in 2007, located in Calvert, Alabama. In 2014 Nippon and ArcelorMittal in a joint venture purchased the Calvert facility.
In 2025, prior to Nippon purchasing USS, Nippon sold its part of the ownership of the Calvert Plant to ArcelorMittal to avoid any antitrust issues with purchasing U.S. Steel
USS has now notified the union that at the end of October they will not be able to send slabs to USS/Granite City Works. Instead those slabs, 70,000 tons per month, will be redirected to Alabama's non-union operations.
Therefore, they will be ceasing operations in Granite City. There are currently about 750 employees working down from 2,000 in recent years.
Not be forgotten: Nippon has been penalized numerous times over the years, including Department of Commerce fining the company duties after a negative determination earlier this year. They are a serial trade cheat. What will stop them from dumping into the U.S. market again once the dust settles from their purchase?