National Works Memories: Dick Grace

Former union president remembers McKeesport plant’s last days

By Jason Togyer
(A version of this interview appeared in The Daily News, McKeesport, Pa., in 1997.)

Few National Plant employees had a better understanding of the mill’s last years than Dick Grace. The 35-year veteran of the maintenance department served for 15 years as a union grievance man and from 1979 to 1985 as president of USWA Local 1408.

So while most employees were coming to terms with their own layoff, Grace and other 1408 officials were coping with more than 3,800.

The years were marked by dispirited meetings with furloughed workers, confrontations with USX leaders and phone calls from anxious spouses to Grace’s home that asked him to “do something to save the mill.”

“Emotionally, it takes a lot out of you,” said the 67-year-old McKeesport resident. “Seeing my local go down from 4,000 to 200 people, inside, it eats you up a little bit. It was a very stressful period.”

Today, Grace is back with the Steelworkers’ union, helping other laid-off members adjust to life after a plant closing and find new work. He also helps retirees and widows look for benefits and straighten out insurance and pension snafus.

But the bitter memories of the death of the 115-year-old National plant are still fresh in his mind, in part because Grace sees its skeleton every day, and in part because 200 of his former co-workers just settled their pension disputes with the company last year.

“You don’t put 35 years in the mill and say you don’t think about it,” he said.

’It was a pleasure to go to work.’

Most of Grace’s career working in structural repair at National was pleasant.

“There was a time when I couldn’t wait to come in and do my job,” he said. “It was a pleasure to go to work. It was a challenging job.”

But sometime in the mid-1970s, the climate began to change from a cooperative relationship between the union and management to a confrontational one, Grace said.

“Management changed from local guys to (ones from headquarters in) Pittsburgh,” he said. “The theme down there was, if you don’t like it, file a grievance. ... You couldn’t make suggestions. They didn’t want to listen to the workers.”

When the layoffs began in earnest in the early ’80s, Grace said, the goal of the Steelworkers was to get furloughed employees into retraining programs. More than 1,500 eventually took up the offer -- so many that the state and federal grant money ran out.

“Once they graduated, they had to relocate to Oklahoma, North Carolina,” Grace said. “I see today there’s not too many of the younger guys around.”

’They called us militant local union presidents’

Locally, union leaders also concentrated on smaller projects -- like saving Duquesne’s Dorothy Six blast furnace, opening a mini-mill at National, and getting U.S. Steel to build a continuous caster in the Mon Valley.

“They called us ’militant local union presidents,’” Grace said, chuckling. “Some of the union was anti-any concessions. Then we had the younger workers saying, ‘hey, I want a job.’ I was willing to combine jobs to save them.”

Grace said the erasure of some traditional craft boundaries was a large concession, but one that was never broached by either side during the mill’s glory years. And any spirit of cooperation that might have led to future concessions evaporated when USX purchased Marathon Oil.

“Boy, did that make us mad,” Grace said. “We made an enormous amount of local concessions, but the company didn’t put anything back into the plant.”

The Marathon purchase was one of the issues that stymied contract negotiations between USX and the USWA in the 1986 and led to a seven-month strike.

Plant reopened the day strike ended

The announcement that National and several other plants were permanently closing came the day that workers returned to their jobs in February 1987. Grace and other former National workers contend the strike may have been the nail in the plant’s coffin. His last day came that summer.

“I was 55 years old and I really didn’t want to retire,” he said. He did electrical work part-time until the USWA asked him to get involved with dislocated workers.

Grace said a University of Pittsburgh study later concluded that about a half-dozen former National employees committed suicide because of the closing. “I felt sorry for the guys who lost their homes, lost their families,” Grace said.

Today, his experiences help him to better relate to workers who have lost their jobs.

“When I go to workshops for guys whose plants have been shut down, I know what they’re going through,” Grace said. “I tell them, ‘Don’t let it eat you up.’”

Written by Jason Togyer from interview conducted October 1997

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A version of this interview originally appeared in The Daily News, McKeesport, Pa., in 1997. Comments, corrections and additions are welcome! Write to Jason Togyer at first initial and last name at gmail dot com. This article is from tubecityonline.com/steel, the Steel Heritage section of Tube City Online, P.O. Box 94, McKeesport, PA 15134.