Wilford Oveson came to Utah Valley in the 1920s to study at Brigham Young University. He dropped out, worked at the Ironton iron plant south of Provo, and then took a swing shift job as a batch plant foreman pouring concrete for the new mill on the Vineyard shore. When construction ended in 1944 he moved into the rolling mill, and he stayed until he retired in January 1973, one of its most senior men.
His son Val, who would become Utah's lieutenant governor, remembered the rhythm of that life. On some Saturdays his father was at the plant to change the knives, the heavy blades that cut the steel, a dirty and greasy job. Like many Geneva men, the Ovesons kept a few acres on the side. Val believed many workers first took mill jobs to supplement their farms, until the mill became the real living.
Bargaining far from Utah
By 1950 Geneva employed nearly a fifth of Utah Valley's workforce, and by one estimate 30 percent of Utah County's workers by 1960. Its hourly workers were organized in the United Steelworkers of America; in later decades their local, number 2701, voted on contracts at its own union hall. Under U.S. Steel, which bought the plant in 1946, their fortunes were tied to bargaining that happened far from Utah.
The first great test came during the Korean War. In 1952 the steel companies refused raises proposed by the government's Wage Stabilization Board unless they could raise prices more than Washington would allow, and the union set a national strike for April 9. The night before, President Harry S. Truman ordered the mills seized. His order listed the Geneva Steel Company of Salt Lake City by name. The Supreme Court struck the seizure down on June 2, the mills went back to their owners, and the steelworkers struck again for more than 50 days.
Seven years later came the longest steel strike the country had yet seen. From July 15 to November 7, 1959, about 500,000 steelworkers walked out over the companies' push to rewrite the contract rules that protected crew sizes and work practices, and more than 85 percent of the nation's steel production stopped. Kaiser Steel, Geneva's big western rival at Fontana, broke from the industry and settled separately on October 26. The strike ended only when the Supreme Court upheld a back to work injunction. Imports, previously negligible, surged while American mills sat idle, and from 1959 foreign steel arriving by sea began to undercut Geneva on the Pacific Coast.
Wildcats and Errors Zero
Inside the gates, relations were often rough. David Bigler, who rose to be U.S. Steel's top public relations man in Salt Lake City, thought the leadership vacuum after Geneva's first president retired in 1951 produced aggressive union leaders swayed by national interests. By the mid 1960s Geneva averaged about 6.6 wildcat strikes a year, a record for any U.S. Steel plant, and the plant's general superintendent, George A. Jedenoff, believed its reputation for walkouts and slowdowns was costing business. By Jedenoff's reckoning, Japanese steel sold for $30 to $35 a ton less than Geneva's.
Jedenoff answered in 1966 with a campaign called Errors Zero, borrowed from a Defense Department idea for cutting production mistakes. N. Eldon Tanner of the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints spoke at its kickoff. The program aimed to make workers see Geneva as their own Utah plant rather than an Eastern corporation's outpost, while cutting wildcat strikes and the number of employees. Bigler credited Jedenoff with bringing company and union closer together.
If I'm not a steelworker, who am I? What am I worth?A former Geneva steelworker, BYU Magazine
In 1984 Val Oveson, campaigning for lieutenant governor, walked through the Geneva gates for the first time, nearly a year after his father's death. Seeing where Wilford had spent his working life, he broke down.
Locked out
Two years later the national contract with USX, as U.S. Steel was now called, ran out at the end of July 1986. On August 1 about 22,000 USX steelworkers stopped work. The company called it a strike; the union called it a lockout, since its members had offered to keep working under the old terms. The Geneva Works shut down except for caretaker crews. The stoppage lasted until January 31, 1987, longer than any steel walkout before it, surpassing 1959.
For Geneva the settlement came too late. U.S. Steel had already sold half of its Pittsburg, California, finishing plant, which took about 70 percent of Geneva's output, to South Korea's Pohang Iron and Steel. Without that market, only one of Geneva's three blast furnaces could run, and its employment was projected to fall from 2,200 to 800. On February 4, 1987, USX put Geneva on permanent standby, and in April it announced the plant would close for good. It reopened that September under new local owners.
The last contracts
The union stayed. On September 1, 1993, members of Local 2701 lined up at the union hall from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. to vote on an 18 month contract with a 40 cent hourly raise and guaranteed incentive pay. Their president, Pete Kropf, said many members distrusted the company, and some coined a slogan, VNT, for Vote No Tomorrow. Doug Eastman, who worked at the plant's Q-BOP furnace, suspected the company earned more than it admitted but said he could not afford a strike.
The last shift came in December 2001, when about 1,200 steelworkers left the mill for the final time; about 1,350 others had already been laid off since 1997. BYU sociologist Marie Cornwall and colleagues surveyed about 600 of them in 2002 and again in 2003. In August 2003 a quarter of the former steelworkers were unemployed, against 4.2 percent in Utah Valley as a whole. They were seven times as likely to report serious financial trouble and four times as likely to have lost their homes, and replacement jobs typically paid $6 to $10 an hour. One man put the loss plainly: "If I'm not a steelworker, who am I? What am I worth?"
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-steelworkers-of-geneva/
