Usx

The U.S. Supreme Court may have ruled in their favor, but it could be many months before thousands of black job applicants see any of the estimated $34 million in damages resulting from their discrimination suit against USX Corp., lawyers said yesterday. On Monday, the court settled the 14-year-old legal dispute, letting stand a ruling that the company discriminated against the applicants at its Fairless Works in Bucks County. "Nothing in life is that simple," said Richard Zern Freemann Jr., an attorney for the group that in 1976 sued the former U.S. Steel Corp.

In a showdown that ended peacefully, about 500 steelworkers yesterday lined up across railroad tracks near the USX Corp.'s idled Fairless Works plant to block the shipment of 30,000 tons of steel to California. The workers, most of them members of Local 4889 of the United Steelworkers of America, lined up across a triple set of tracks just outside the plant in Falls Township and prevented Conrail locomotives from entering the facility. The unfinished steel had already been loaded on 200 flat cars lined up on tracks inside the plant.

USX Corp. chairman David M. Roderick yesterday predicted that USX's profits will continue to rise, thanks in part to improved productivity and market demand in its once struggling steel operations. But Roderick warned not to expect the recall of steel workers because of renewed profitability in steelmaking. The steel and energy giant yesterday reported second-quarter earnings of $149 million after a hefty first-quarter loss of $97 million. Roderick said productivity in steel improved "substantially" from 1982, when it took 10 man-hours to produce a ton of steel, to the second quarter of 1987, when that figure dropped to about 4 man-hours per ton. He also said that the company's World War II-era steel plant in Provo, Utah, was to be sold today, and that there were no plans to restart idled, aging mills in the Monongahela Valley near Pittsburgh, and in Baytown, Texas.

A Bucks County judge said yesterday that he would rule on Dec. 30 whether striking union steelworkers must allow USX Corp. to truck steel products from its Fairless Works. The company has been prohibited from shipping by truck by a Dec. 4 agreement with steelworkers, who said that in exchange they would not block the gate of the steel mill in Falls Township. Steelworkers have been picketing the mill since Aug. 1, when the United Steelworkers of America's national contract with USX expired.

A Bucks County judge yesterday ordered steelworkers at USX Corp. to limit their picketing and to allow the company to truck steel products from its Fairless Works plant. The order, which takes effect Friday, prohibits mass picketing, threats of violence or other actions to stop shipments from the mill, idled since Aug. 1 in a labor dispute. A spokesman for the steelworkers' union said yesterday that the injunction would be appealed. Earlier this month, 48 steelworkers were arrested and cited for blocking the main gate of the Falls Township plant.

A soil-recycling firm is the latest company looking to relocate in the now- barren buildings of USX Corp. CleanSoils Inc. of Minneapolis received preliminary approval from the Board of Supervisors last week for its plan to lease nine acres on the site. A large portion of the steel mill has been vacant since USX scaled down its operation two years ago. Although the company would primarily use an existing structure, it wants to add a small, modular building, which requires the firm to go through the lengthy land development process.

Amid gloom over the future of steel-making at the Fairless Works in Bucks County, members of the United Steelworkers there voted yesterday to authorize their leaders to call a strike, a union official said. Members of Local 4889 thus joined steelworkers at other USX Corp. plants around the country in authorizing a strike anytime after 12:01 a.m. tomorrow, when their labor contract expires. The local represents most of the 3,000 blue-collar workers at the plant on the Delaware River, opened in the early 1950s.

More than 150 steelworkers, who contend that years of laboring in the roar of the Fairless Works plant caused their hearing losses, will share nearly $9 million in compensation from USX Corp. Under terms of an agreement reached with lawyers representing the workers this week, the steel company will compensate current and former employees of its Bucks County mill who had brought claims for worker's compensation. The money will be divided according to a formula that considers a number of factors, including the degree of hearing loss, the number of years the worker spent at the plant and the worker's age. Lawyers representing the workers and the company devised the formula.

The work stoppage at the steelmaking operations of USX Corp. in late 1986 caused price-cutting by refractory companies and hurt profitability in the fourth quarter for General Refractories Co. of Bala Cynwyd. Profits were reduced by about four-fifths in the quarter ended Dec. 31, although gross revenues were essentially flat in comparison with the final quarter of 1985. The company sells refractories, which are heat-resistant linings for steelmaking furnaces. Despite the fourth-quarter results, General Refractories chalked up sharp increases in profits for the full year.

Depending on which side of the bargaining table one sits, 1979 will be remembered as the year that began a decade of corporate panhandling, or of labor's finally ending its free ride. Beleaguered Chrysler Corp., on the verge of bankruptcy, went to Congress that year seeking relief from financial hardship. And for the first time in nearly 50 years, the company then turned to its 105,000 unionized workers and asked them to accept less in wages and benefits than they had won in their previous contract.

Global Resource Corp., a West Berlin developer of technology to extract petroleum from nontraditional sources, hopes to build a $70 million tire-recycling plant at the former USX Corp. site in Fairless Hills. The plant will take about a year to construct once the permit process is completed, and will be able to process 36,000 pounds of tires per hour, according to Hawk Hogan, the company's head engineer. He added that it will employ about 250 people. The company disclosed its plans in a filing last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The Fairless Works steel factory that helped give birth to Levittown, Pa., and raised thousands of Bucks County families into a middle-class lifestyle is all but closing its doors. USX Corp., the nation's largest steelmaker, said yesterday that it would permanently lay off 600 of the last 700 workers at the plant by November. Many of them are already on short-term layoff because of weak market conditions for steel. The plant's cutback, combined with yesterday's announcement that 3M Co. was closing its Bristol Township tape-making plant, deals a heavy blow to lower Bucks County.

Joseph A. Rosar, 46, of Richboro, a professional engineer who won academic honors in high school and college, died Thursday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania after suffering an aneurysm. A year ago, he joined Griffin Pipe Co. as works manager of its plant in Florence, N.J. At the time of his death, he also was studying for a master's degree in business administration at Pennsylvania State University. Previously he worked for Lukens Steel Co. in Coatesville and resided in Honey Brook for 10 years.

Officials at USX Realty said yesterday they had signed a deal with an undisclosed developer to build a 500-megawatt gas-fired power plant here. "It's a community service, if you will, and it's nice for us because we will derive some lease income," said Dennis McCartney, USX Realty general manager. "It will mean jobs, but not thousands. It's good for the industrial park, good for the community, it's good for them and good for the area. This is the place where it belongs. " The place is 25 acres of USX's former steel-production plant, now an industrial park.

Clayton E. Sager, 76, of Levittown, a retired steelworker who was active with the American Legion, died Saturday at Chandler Hall in Newtown Township after an illness. He had retired on disability after 40 years with U.S. Steel Corp., now USX Corp. He was a finishing mill roller at the Fairless Works in Fairless Hills, and earlier was employed at the company's Donora Works near Pittsburgh. With the American Legion, Mr. Sager had served as commander of John F. Kennedy Post 377 in California, Pa., been deputy commander of the 25th District in Western Pennsylvania, and held various positions in the Department of Pennsylvania.

Nearly all of about 300 steelworkers who were laid off in November have been called back to jobs at Fairless Works in the past three weeks, as the American steel industry has rallied from a record flood of foreign steel that sent it reeling late last year. After recent federal trade rulings that have helped reduce imports, orders for hot-rolled domestic steel - which had virtually evaporated in December - have steadily increased over the last two months at USX Corp.'s Fairless Works Sheet and Tin Division and other U.S. steel companies.

The bounty will be meager this Thanksgiving at Bob Winder's dinner table. As one of roughly 300 steelworkers at the USX Corp. Fairless Works Sheet and Tin Division who officially received word yesterday that he will no longer have a job, Winder, 50, a divorced father of three from Levittown, knows that now is not the time for excessive spending. "I'm going to have a real light Thanksgiving dinner," Winder said, momentarily stepping away from the four-stand cold mill that compresses and shapes coils of sheeted steel.

The Novolipetsk Metallurgical Kombinat iron and steel mill sprawls across more than 7,000 acres of Central Russia, a labyrinth of furnaces, smokestacks, and miles and miles of steam pipes. Inscribed atop the town's Palace of Culture is the slogan "Glory to Steelmakers"; the Metallurg Restaurant sits just across the square. More than 47,000 workers, and the entire 600,000 population of Lipetsk, depend on the steel mill, the third-largest in Russia. Along the Delaware River in Bucks County, there is another steel plant, Fairless Works, where hundreds of the 850 employees are facing layoffs and pay cuts because of imports from the Novolipetsk plant and elsewhere around the world.

Blaming a massive increase in imported steel, USX Corp. yesterday said it would cut production at Fairless Works in Bucks County by at least 70 percent. More than 850 workers are employed at the plant in Fairless Hills, which finishes raw steel for the auto, appliance and construction industries. By the end of this month, hundreds of workers will be laid off or shifted to lower-paying jobs for an indefinite period, said George Klein, general manager of Fairless Works. "The actions we're being forced to take at the Fairless plant are a direct result of the record tonnages of illegally dumped foreign steel reaching this country," said Paul J. Wilhelm, president of USX's U.S. Steel Group.

Ron Howard is no fool. Over the last eight years, he has parlayed a largely unknown distributing business out of his Richboro home into an escalating enterprise based in a 6,000-square-foot warehouse in Newtown. All the while, orders for tape, stretch wrap and packaging supplies that Howard's Ultra-Pak Inc. distributes kept pouring in. So when the need for more expansion became apparent, Howard looked to build a larger facility in Falls Township. "I'd rather stay closer to my home," Howard said.