LONE STAR, Texas -- About 250 steel workers in an East Texas town crippled by layoffs over a year ago will get an early Christmas present with Lone Star Steel's plans to resume operations in its steel-making division.
Lone Star spokesman Mayo Lanagan said the company was aiming for a mid-December reopening of its ore plant and blast furnace and planned to recall about 250 people who had been laid off.
He said Lone Star had been making gradual recalls of workers since January, when employment was at 670, and had a current workforce of about 1,900.
Lone Star, the nation's second-largest producer of oilfield pipe, laid off 4,000 workers in August 1982, decimating its namesake town and the surrounding communities whose residents depended on Lone Star for jobs. Lone Star is located about 130 miles east of Dallas.
Lone Star had been losing money since the decline of oilfield drilling activity in the late 1970s.
Joseph Shenton, a spokesman in New York for Lone Star's parent company, Northwest Industries Inc., said it was not clear whether the East Texas plant would ever return to its peak employment figure of 5,000.
Lanagan said Lone Star was hopeful the gradual improvement would continue.
'We certainly hope it will continue to increase,' he said. 'We're presently operating electric furnaces, specialty mills and pipe tubing operations, and this (reopening) will mean an increase in the amount produced.'
Harold Warnix, vice president of 4,000-member Local 4134 of the United Steelworkers of America, said union members believed their acceptance of a new contract in September may have led to the increased operations.
In that pact, workers agreed to an across-the-board pay cut of $2.80 an hour, gave up two holidays, and cut holiday pay from double time and a half to straight double time.
'We knew we had to do something to help the company get back on a competitive basis,' Warnix said, 'so we were willing to make these concessions to help.'
He said this week's announcement was quite a relief.
'We've been real fortunate because very few people have actually run out of benefits. But it's been a long hard struggle,' Warnix said.
'We think it's going to be a slow turnaround, but we feel like if the oil drilling starts to pick back up our jobs will increase more.'
Jerry Crump, manager of Crump's Grocery Store in the town of 2,000, said the gradual recall had not yet had much of an impact on businesses other than Lone Star, but he was optimistic that recovery was on the way.
'Probably 80 percent of industries in the surrounding area are dependent on Lone Star,' Crump said. 'When it shut down it hurt all businesses in the area. They even felt the crunch 35 miles south in Longview.
'There has been great anticipation for the past year (about a reopening),' he said. 'It's got to start somewhere.'
