Editorial: Keep focus on steel promise from State of the Union

You can’t focus on infrastructure without mentioning steel.

Build a bridge or dam, and you’re using steel. Build a school or hospital, and it’s part of the process. There is steel in roadways and railroads, ambulances and firetrucks. Steel is the skeleton that supports the body of the nation.

So if you’re talking about fixing anything about the American infrastructure, steel has to be part of the conversation. That made it unsurprising that Southwestern Pennsylvania got a call-out in the State of the Union speech.

It was more than just a passing mention. Joseph “JoJo” Burgess of Washington, Pa., was a guest of first lady Jill Biden, sitting in the executive gallery for President Biden’s annual address.

Burgess is a member of United Steelworkers Local 1157. He works at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works as a new employee organization trainer. His father was a steelworker. So is his son. He met the president when Biden visited Pittsburgh on Jan. 28, and he was asked whether he would introduce Biden.

“I’m looking at my wife like, are you serious?” Burgess said. “It was the luck of the draw — or the luck of the Lord, I would say — that’s all it was.”

Presidents — all politicians — meet countless people every day at events like this. The Jan. 28 appearance at Carnegie Mellon University’s advanced manufacturing research facilities at Mill 19 in Hazelwood probably stood out, though. Biden was talking infrastructure just hours after the Fern Hollow Bridge in Frick Park collapsed — a dramatic example of why infrastructure investment is important.

Burgess and workers like him are another example. They may be less dramatic but they are just as important. They represent the way in which investing in infrastructure invests in people and, therefore, invests in communities.

“When we use taxpayers’ dollars to rebuild America, we are going to do it by buying American: buy American products, support American jobs,” Biden said. “We will buy American to make sure everything from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the steel on highway guardrails is made in America from beginning to end.”

That means not only job security for workers like Burgess, but it also should mean new jobs for more men and women in the area. It ought to encourage U.S. Steel to reprioritize the Mon Valley Works and the $1 billion investment it announced in May 2019 and walked back in April 2021.

The shrinking size of the steel industry that once dominated Pittsburgh and surrounding communities has been no secret. It has gone hand in hand with growth of steel as an import rather than an export. In 2021, U.S. companies bought 25 million metric tons of foreign steel. The U.S. exported just 8.3 million metric tons.

But those numbers ignore other statistics. American steel manufacturers big and small made a lot more than that in pig iron and raw steel — more than 100 million metric tons, with a raw steel value alone of $110 billion, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. And while Pittsburgh may be shorthand for steel, Pennsylvania produces just 5% of America’s stock, behind Ohio and Indiana.

If the Biden administration is going to turn a spotlight on Southwestern Pennsylvania for the State of the Union, that’s great. But it is up to the congressional delegation, the state, the companies that produce the steel and the people who do the work to keep American — and Pennsylvanian — steel as the framework of infrastructure conversations.