LTV steelworkers head to Washington

GARY, Ind., Dec. 11 (UPI) -- Two busloads of steelworkers laid off from LTV's Indiana Harbor Works headed to Washington Tuesday to call for Congress and the Bush administration to bail out the beleaguered industry and save their jobs.

The buses left from the union's McBride Hall in the gritty industrial city, and hundreds of other union members boarded buses in Cleveland, where LTV has two plants, and at the company's finishing mill in Hennepin, Ill.

Union workers plan to camp out in tents and sleeping bags at the George Meany Center just outside the capital this week and lobby Congress for the same kind of loan guarantees the airline industry received after Sept. 11 and import quotas and tariffs on foreign steel sold below the cost of production.

"This is not right what's going on," said Eddie Gonzalez, a steelworker for 23 years. "This is a good mill and it's always produced good steel."

Laid off steelworkers are eligible for maximum unemployment benefits of $312 a week for 26 weeks -- a far cry from good paying mill jobs that paid more than $50,000 a year.

The bankrupt LTV Corp. placed blast furnaces at the Indiana Harbor Works in East Chicago on hot idle Monday after dismissing more than 1,300 of plant's 2,600 employees during the weekend. The shuttered plant will have only a skeleton maintenance crew of 200 by Friday, said LTV spokesman Mark Tomasch.

United Steelworkers Local 1011 official Loren Hanson said the workers were going to Washington out of frustration.

"We have to put a face on what's happening in the steel industry. We have to push the federal government on legislation to help us. If we don't get help, we're dead in the water," Hanson told the Hammond Times.

LTV began the layoffs on Friday after federal bankruptcy Judge William Bodoh refused to block the corporation's plan to shutdown steelmaking operations so the assets could be sold. A bankruptcy court in Pittsburgh will consider LTV's request to dissolve the labor contract Dec. 19, which would freeze pensions and end health-care benefits for employees and retirees.

Cleveland-based LTV filed for bankruptcy last Dec. 28, blaming its problems on a flood of low-priced foreign steel.

"LTV is going out of business," Tomasch said.