Less than three months after the ink dried on the Nippon Steel purchase of U.S. Steel, the new Japanese owners have announced they will close U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works in Illinois. The plant will stop making steel in October, and the 800 employees will remain “employed” at their current pay to “maintain” the facility’s steelmaking capacity until the end of 2027. That’s when the protections against layoffs they received under the U.S. Steel sales agreement will run out.

The Granite City workers have seen this movie before. The plant, which started producing steel 125 years ago, was closed at the beginning of 2016. It is one of U.S. Steel’s blast furnace mills, a traditional way of making steel by melting iron ore, among other steelmaking ingredients.

When a New York Times reporter v

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