Harris opposes Nippon Steel’s $15bn bid for US Steel

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Kamala Harris said US Steel should remain “American owned and American operated” during a visit to Pennsylvania on Monday, dealing the latest blow to Nippon Steel’s hopes of buying the company.

Harris’s comments about a proposed foreign takeover of US Steel echo US President Joe Biden’s own opposition to the deal with Nippon Steel. However they have new significance since Harris, Biden’s vice-president, is now the Democratic nominee for president.

“We will continue to strengthen America’s manufacturing sector,” Harris said at a union hall in Pittsburgh, the city where US Steel has its headquarters. “US Steel is a historic American company, and it is vital for our nation to maintain strong American steel companies.”

“US Steel should remain American owned and American operated,” she told the cheering crowd. “And I will always have the back of America’s steelworkers and all of America’s workers.”

Harris made the comments as she celebrated the Labor Day holiday in her efforts to court blue-collar union votes in two critical industrial swing states. Before travelling to Pennsylvania on Monday, Harris made a stop in Michigan.

Nippon Steel’s planned $15bn acquisition of US Steel has faced a bipartisan political backlash, as populist economics and the protection of domestic manufacturing replace the US’s long-standing consensus in favour of open investment.

Donald Trump, the former president and Republican nominee for the White House, has also vowed to block Nippon Steel’s US Steel bid.

US Steel said it remained “committed” to the deal. “The partnership with Nippon Steel, a long-standing investor in the United States from our close ally Japan, will strengthen the American steel industry, American jobs, and American supply chains, and enhance the US steel industry’s competitiveness and resilience against China,” it said in a statement.

Nippon has hired Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump, to lobby in favour of the deal, and pledged to increase its investment in US Steel facilities if the transaction is completed. The statement from Harris, however, will complicate that push.

Harris has gained the endorsement of most of the crucial US labour unions, which are a powerful constituency within the Democratic party and help rally voters in battleground states.

Both the United Steel Workers and the United Auto Workers have backed the vice-president since she entered the race.

While union leaders are strongly in favour of Harris, and have repeatedly attacked Trump as a phoney champion of the working class, Harris is still facing a battle to win over rank-and-file union members who have drifted towards the Republican party in recent years.

One exception to Harris’s support in organised labour is the Teamsters Union, which represents 1.3mn members including truck drivers and construction workers. It has declined to endorse a presidential candidate so far.

Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, spoke at the Republican convention in July, but suggested he was open to backing Harris if she sat down for an interview with him.

According to the Financial Times’ polling tracker, Harris leads Trump nationally by 3.7 percentage points with little more than two months to go before election day.

She holds narrow leads in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania, which should be sufficient to win the presidency, while Trump has a slight edge in other battleground states including North Carolina, Arizona and Georgia.

“We know it’s going to be a tight race to the very end,” Harris said.