Senator Sherrod Brown visited Cleveland-Cliffs' steel mill Wednesday to meet with union leaders and workers on a campaign to halt the sale of U.S. Steel to Japanese-based Nippon Steel.
Brown said he wants President Joe Biden to block the deal he said could potentially affect hundreds of local jobs.
"We can't let a foreign company swoop in and ignore — this is the most important point — ignore the voices of union workers and buy a major American steel manufacturer all behind closed doors," Brown said.
Nippon announced in December plans to buy the Pittsburgh-based company for $14.1 billion, according to The Associated Press.
Nippon has treated workers as a "nuisance," Brown said during the press conference. He is pushing the Biden administration to investigate national security concerns and other ways to block the merger.
If the deal goes through, Nippon will likely reduce the company's steelmaking capacity, citing the company's closure of four blast furnaces across the country over the last four years that displaced 6,000 workers, said Donnie Blatt, the director of the local steelworkers' union. Nippon Steel previously stated there would be no layoffs.
"The times of CEOs that work for the shareholders and for the shareholders only is gone," said Cleveland-Cliffs' CEO Lourenco Goncalves. "That's a failure that we need to fix in capitalism. There is only capitalism when we, the people benefit from capitalism. It should not be done just to benefit the few. Capitalism was not built to make billionaires. Capitalism was built to make the middle class thrive, and that's what we are about."
During his three terms in the Senate, Brown has courted working-class voters, positioning himself as a pro-Labor Democrat. Brown will face Republican challenger Bernie Moreno this November.
Nippon Steel could not be immediately reached for comment on this story.
