U.S. Steel

History

20th century

In 1901, J. P. Morgan created U.S. Steel by merging Carnegie Steel Company, Federal Steel, and National Steel for $492 million (equivalent to roughly $19 billion in 2025).

During its peak years, U.S. Steel, then known on Wall Street as "The Corporation," was known more for its size than its efficiency or innovation. In 1901, the company was far and away the largest steel manufacturer, producing roughly two-thirds of the steel in the United States. The company also operated the largest commercial fleet on the Great Lakes through its Pittsburgh Steamship Company. Due to large debts from its founding, since Andrew Carnegie demanded gold bonds for his share, and concerns about antitrust lawsuits, U.S. Steel operated cautiously.

In 1902, its first full year of operations, U.S. Steel made 67 percent of all the steel produced in the United States. In 2001, that production had fallen to only eight percent.

For much of the 20th century, U.S. Steel was both the world's largest steel producer and its largest corporation. It was capitalized at $1.4 billion ($54.2 billion today), making it the world's first billion-dollar corporation, although the U.S. Bureau of Corporations would later value it at around $700 million.

The company's headquarters was located in the Empire Building in New York City; where it remained one of the building's largest tenants for 75 years. Charles M. Schwab, the Carnegie Steel executive who originally suggested the merger to Morgan, ultimately emerged as the new corporation's first President.

In 1907, U.S. Steel acquired its largest competitor, the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, and Tennessee Coal was replaced on the Dow Jones Industrial Average by General Electric. The following year, in March 1908, the company formed the Committee on Safety of United States Steel following chairman Elbert H. Gary's meetings with safety managers of the operating companies, leading to the introduction of the modern "Safety First" movement. The committee's formation was intended to enhance workplace safety, reduce worker accidents, and safeguard the company against criticisms and legal liability.

21st century

In 2001, under CEO Thomas Usher, it spun off Marathon and other non-steel assets, except Transtar, and expanded internationally by acquiring plants in Slovakia and Serbia.

During the early 2010s, U.S. Steel modernized its software systems across its manufacturing facilities. Facing financial challenges, the company sold its underperforming Serbian mills near Belgrade to the Serbian government in January 2012. In 2014, U.S. Steel’s falling market value caused its removal from the S&P 500 and its transfer to the S&P MidCap 400.

However, in October 2019, U.S. Steel made a bold strategic move by investing $700 million in Big River Steel, securing a 49.9% ownership stake in the pioneering LEED-certified steel facility. Doubling down on its bet, U.S. Steel announced in December 2020 that it would acquire the remaining interest in Big River Steel for $774 million, finalizing the acquisition in January 2021.

In February 2022, U.S. Steel began construction on a new mill in Osceola, Arkansas which will be operational by 2024. In April 2022, the electric arc furnace flat-rolled Big River Steel mill in Osceola became the first ResponsibleSteel site certified in North America following an independent audit by SRI Quality System Registrar (SRI).

In July 2023, Cleveland-Cliffs made an offer to acquire U.S. Steel for US$7.3 billion (equivalent to $7.5 billion in 2025). This put the company into play, culminating on December 18, 2023, when Nippon Steel proposed to acquire U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion (equivalent to $15.3 billion in 2025). The Nippon proposal was approved by U.S. Steel shareholders in April 2024. Nippon pledged to keep U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh headquarters and honor union contracts.

The deal has received a range of reactions from prominent steelworkers labor union United Steelworkers (USW), policymakers, investors, and other stakeholders. On March 14, 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden declared that U.S. Steel must remain American-owned, stating the proposed acquisition by Nippon Steel would pose a risk to national security, and also declared that he would use U.S. regulatory authorities to scuttle the deal. After this revelation, it was noted the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had the authority to block the acquisition based on national security matters.

Legal issues

Labor

U.S. Steel maintained the labor policies of Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie believed that "good wages and good workmen I know to be cheap labor." The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union that represented workers at the Homestead, Pennsylvania, plant was, for many years, broken after a violent strike in 1892. U.S. Steel defeated another strike in 1901, the year it was founded. U.S. Steel built the city of Gary, Indiana, in 1906, and 100 years later it remained the location of the largest integrated steel mill in the Northern Hemisphere. U.S. Steel reached a détente with unions during World War I, when under pressure from the Wilson Administration it relaxed its opposition to unions enough to allow some to operate in certain factories. It returned to its previous policies as soon as the war ended, however, and in a 1919 strike defeated union-organizing efforts by William Z. Foster of the AFL.

Heavy pressure from public opinion forced the company to give up its 12-hour day and adopt the standard eight-hour day. During the 1920s, U.S. Steel, like many other large employers, coupled paternalistic employment practices with "employee representation plans" (ERPs), which were company unions sponsored by management. These ERPs eventually became an important factor leading to the organization of the United Steelworkers of America. The company dropped its hard-line, anti-union stance in 1937, when Myron Taylor, then president of U.S. Steel, agreed to recognize the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, an arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) led by John L. Lewis. Taylor was an outsider, brought in during the Great Depression to rescue U.S. Steel. Watching the upheaval caused by the United Auto Workers' successful sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, and convinced that Lewis was someone he could deal with on a businesslike basis, Taylor sought stability through collective bargaining.

Still, U.S. Steel worked hand-in-hand with the Birmingham (Alabama) Police Department as it vigorously investigated and targeted labor activities during the 1930s and 1940s. The corporation developed and fed information to a "Red Squad" of detectives "who used the city's vagrancy and criminal-anarchy statutes (liberally reinforced by backroom beatings) to strike at radical labor organizers." In the 1950s, those investigations shifted from labor to civil rights activists.

The Steelworkers continue to have a contentious relationship with U.S. Steel, but far less so than the relationship that other unions had with employers in other industries in the United States. They launched a number of long strikes against U.S. Steel in 1946 and a 116-day strike in 1959, but those strikes were over wages and benefits and not the more fundamental issue of union recognition that led to violent strikes elsewhere.

Environmental record

During the 1948 Donora smog, an air inversion trapped industrial effluent (air pollution) from the American Steel and Wire plant and U.S. Steel's Donora Zinc Works in Donora, Pennsylvania.

In three days, 20 people died... After the inversion lifted, another 50 died, including Lukasz Musial, the father of baseball great Stan Musial. Hundreds more lived the rest of their lives with damaged lungs and hearts. But another 40 years would pass before the whole truth about Donora's bad air made public-health history.

Today the Donora Smog Museum in that city tells of the influence that the hazardous Donora Smog had on the air quality standards enacted by the federal government in subsequent years.

Researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute have ranked U.S. Steel as the 58th-greatest corporate producer of air pollution in the United States (down from their 2000 ranking as the second-greatest). In 2008, the company released more than one million kg (2.2 million pounds) of toxins, chiefly ammonia, hydrochloric acid, ethylene, zinc compounds, methanol, and benzene, but including manganese, cyanide, and chromium compounds. In 2004, the city of River Rouge, Michigan, and the residents of River Rouge and the nearby city of Ecorse filed a class-action lawsuit against the company for "the release and discharge of air particulate matter...and other toxic and hazardous substances" at its River Rouge plant.

The company has also been implicated in generating water pollution and toxic waste. In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an order for U.S. Steel to clean up a site on the Delaware River in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, where the soil had been contaminated with arsenic, lead, and other heavy metals, as well as naphthalene. Groundwater at the site was found to be polluted with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and trichloroethylene (TCE). In 2005, the EPA, United States Department of Justice, and the State of Ohio reached a settlement requiring U.S. Steel to pay more than $100,000 in penalties and $294,000 in reparations in answer to allegations that the company illegally released pollutants into Ohio waters. U.S. Steel's Gary, Indiana facility has been repeatedly charged with discharging polluted wastewater into Lake Michigan and the Grand Calumet River. In 1998 the company agreed to payment of a $30 million settlement to clean up contaminated sediments from a five-mile (8 km) stretch of the river.

Legacy

U.S. Steel Tower

The U.S. Steel Tower in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is named after the company and since 1970, the company's corporate headquarters have been located there. It is the tallest skyscraper in the downtown Pittsburgh skyline, built out of the company's Corten Steel. New York City's One Liberty Plaza was also built by the corporation as that city's U.S. Steel Tower in 1973.

Steelmark logo

When the Steelmark logo was created, U.S. Steel attached the following meaning to it: "Steel lightens your work, brightens your leisure and widens your world." The logo was used as part of a major marketing campaign to educate consumers about how important steel is in people's daily lives. The Steelmark logo was used in print, radio and television ads as well as on labels for all steel products, from steel tanks to tricycles to filing cabinets.

In the 1960s, U.S. Steel turned over the Steelmark program to the AISI, where it came to represent the steel industry as a whole. During the 1970s, the logo's meaning was extended to include the three materials used to produce steel: yellow for coal, orange for ore and blue for steel scrap. In the late 1980s, when the AISI founded the Steel Recycling Institute (SRI), the logo took on a new life reminiscent of its 1950s meaning.

The Pittsburgh Steelers professional football team borrowed elements of its logo, a circle containing three hypocycloids, from the Steelmark logo belonging to the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) and created by U.S. Steel. In the 1950s, when helmet logos became popular, the Steelers added players' numbers to either side of their gold helmets. Later that decade, the numbers were removed and in 1962, Cleveland's Republic Steel suggested to the Steelers that they use the Steelmark as a helmet logo.

U.S. Steel financed and constructed the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, New York, for the 1964 World's Fair. It is the largest globe ever made and is one of the world's largest free-standing sculptures.

Chicago Picasso sculpture

The Chicago Picasso sculpture was fabricated by U.S. Steel in Gary, Indiana, before being disassembled and relocated to Chicago. U.S. Steel donated the steel for the construction of St. Michael's Catholic Church in Chicago since 90 percent of the parishioners worked at its mills.

United States Steel Hour television program and Walt Disney World involvement

U.S. Steel sponsored The United States Steel Hour television program from 1945 until 1963 on CBS. U.S. Steel built both the Disney's Contemporary Resort and the Disney's Polynesian Resort in 1971 at Walt Disney World, in part to showcase its residential steel building "modular" products to high-end and luxury consumers.

This same U.S. Steel manufacturing plant that was located on Disney property also helped build the now defunct Court of Flags Resort in Orlando, Florida, on Major Blvd.

Real estate development

U.S. Steel was also involved with Florida real estate development including building beachfront condominiums during the 1970s, such as Sand Key near Daytona Beach, Florida, and the Pasadena Yacht and Country Club near St. Petersburg, Florida.

Facilities

U.S. Steel has multiple domestic and international facilities.

Of note in the United States are Clairton Coke Works, Edgar Thomson Works, and Irvin Plant, which are all members of Mon Valley Works just outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Clairton Works is the largest coking facility in North America. Edgar Thomson Works is one of the oldest steel mills in the world. The company acquired Great Lakes Works and Granite City Works, both large integrated steel mills, in 2003 and is partnered with Severstal North America in operating the world's largest electro-galvanizing line, Double Eagle Steel Coating Company at the historic Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan.

U.S. Steel's largest domestic facility is Gary Works, in Gary, Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For many years, the Gary Works Plant was the world-largest steel mill and it remains the largest integrated mill in North America. It was built in 1906 and has been operating since June 28, 1908. Gary is also home to the U.S. Steel Yard baseball stadium.

U.S. Steel operates a tin mill in East Chicago now known as East Chicago Tin. The mill was idled in 2015, but reopened shortly after. The mill was then 'permanently idled' in 2019, however the facility remains in possession of the corporation as of early 2020.

U.S. Steel operates a sheet and tin finishing facility in Portage, Indiana, known as Midwest Plant, acquired after the National Steel Corporation bankruptcy. U.S. Steel acquired National Steel Corporation in May 2003 for $850 million and assumption of $200 million in debt. U.S. Steel operates Great Lakes Works in Ecorse, Michigan, Midwest Plant in Portage, Indiana, and Granite City Steel in Granite City, Illinois. In 2008 a major expansion of Granite City was announced, including a new coke plant with an annual capacity of 650,000 tons.

U.S. Steel operates Fairfield Works in Fairfield, Alabama (Birmingham), employing 1,500 people, and operates a sheet galvanizing operation at the Fairless Works facility in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania, employing 75 people.

U.S. Steel operates three pipe mills: Fairfield Tubular Operations in Fairfield, Alabama (Birmingham), McKeesport Tubular Operations, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and Texas Operations (Formerly Lone Star Steel) in Lone Star, Texas. A fourth pipe mill, Lorain Tubular Operations in Lorain, Ohio is no longer operating at this time.

Railroad ownership

U.S. Steel once owned the Northampton and Bath Railroad. The N&B was an 11-kilometer (6.8 mi) Shortline railroad built in 1904 that served Atlas Cement in Northampton, Pennsylvania, and Keystone Cement in Bath, Pennsylvania. By 1979 cement shipments had dropped off such that the railroad was no longer economically viable, and U.S. Steel abandoned the line. A 1.5-kilometer (0.93 mi) section of track was retained to serve Atlas Cement. The remainder of the right-of-way was transformed into the Nor-Bath Trail. U.S. Steel also owned the Atlantic City Mine Railroad, whose 76.7-mile (123.4 km) line in Wyoming operated from 1962 until 1983 and served an iron ore mine north of Atlantic City, Wyoming.

Through its Transtar subsidiary, U.S. Steel also owned other railroads that served its mines and mills. Those properties included the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway in the iron-mining region of northeast Minnesota; the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern that served its Gary Works in northwest Indiana; the Birmingham Southern Railroad serving the U.S. Steel mill in Birmingham, Alabama; and the Bessemer & Lake Erie and Union railroads in western Pennsylvania that delivered iron ore and provided plant-switching services at its mill complex in Braddock, Pennsylvania and coke works in Clairton, Pennsylvania.

U.S. Steel also owned a large Great Lakes commercial freighter fleet, under the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, that transported its raw materials from the Duluth area to Ashtabula, Ohio; Gary, Indiana; and Conneaut, Ohio. The laker fleet, the B&LE, and the DM&IR were acquired by Canadian National after U.S. Steel sold most of Transtar to that company. The ships are leased out to a different, domestic operator because of the United States cabotage law.

Corporate social responsibility

In January 2025, U.S. Steel received the Equality 100 Award from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation (HRCF) after earning a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index (CEI) for the fifth consecutive year.

Corporate affairs

Business trends

The key trends for U.S. Steel are (as of the financial year ending December 31):

Ownership

U.S. Steel was mainly owned by institutional investors. The 10 largest shareholders in late 2024 were:

BlackRock (11.72%)

The Vanguard Group (9.08%)

Pentwater Capital Management (8.18%)

State Street Corporation (4.18%)

Dimensional Fund Advisors (4.10%)

Massachusetts Financial Services (2.40%)

T. Rowe Price (2.12%)

Donald Smith & Co (2.11%)

KGH Ltd. (2.03%)

Geode Capital Management (1.71%)

Presidents

Charles M. Schwab (1901–1903)

William E. Corey (1903–1911)

James Augustine Farrell, Sr.– (1911–1932)

William A. Irvin (April 19, 1932 – January 1, 1938)

Benjamin Franklin Fairless (1938–1952)

Clifford Hood (1952–1959)

Walter F. Munford (May 5, 1959 – September 8, 1959)

Leslie B. Worthington (1959–1967)

Edwin H. Gott (1967–1969)

Edgar B. Speer (1969–1973)

David M. Roderick (1973–1979)

William Roesch (1979–1983)

Charles A. Corry (January 25, 1988 – May 31, 1989)

Thomas J. Usher (1994–1995)

Paul J. Wilhelm (1994–2001)

Thomas J. Usher (2001–2003)

John P. Surma (2003–2013)

Mario Longhi— President & CEO of U.S. Steel (September 1, 2013 – May 10, 2017)

David Burritt— President & CEO (May 10, 2017 – present)

Chairmen of the Board of Directors

Elbert Henry Gary (1901–1927)

J. P. Morgan Jr. (1927–1932)

Myron Charles Taylor (1932–1938)

Edward Stettinius Jr. (1938–1940)

Irving Sands Olds (1940–1952)

Benjamin Franklin Fairless— Chairman & CEO of U.S. Steel (1952–1955)

Roger Blough— Chairman & CEO (3 May 1955 – 31 January 1969)

Edwin H. Gott— Chairman & CEO (January 31, 1969 – March 1, 1973)

Edgar B. Speer— Chairman & CEO (March 1, 1973 – April 24, 1979)

David M. Roderick— Chairman & CEO (April 24, 1979 – May 31, 1989)

Charles A. Corry— Chairman & CEO (May 31, 1989 – July 1, 1995)

Thomas Usher— Chairman & CEO (July 1, 1995 – October 1, 2004)

John P. Surma— Chairman & CEO (October 1, 2004 – December 31, 2013)

David S. Sutherland— Non-executive Chairman of the Board (2014—present)