BLYTHEVILLE — It's not just Texarkana tire makers who are worried about cheap Chinese imports.
Steelworkers in Blytheville are also watching the Chinese tire case with interest.
Nucor Corp., a Charlotte, N.C., steel company with 1,500 workers in northeast Arkansas "strongly supports," the tire workers' case, said Eileen Bradner, the company's senior director for federal government affairs.
Bradner said Nucor's plants are running at less than 50 percent capacity. "Part of that is the overall economic climate," she said, "and part of that is due to the hit that our customers are taking."
Two companies in Arkansas that buy huge spools of rolled steel from Nucor, TMK-Ipsco and Tenaris Hickman, are partof a pending case at the International Trade Commission. The case claims that China flooded the U.S. market with steel tubes used in oil drilling and transmission.
Murray Giesbrecht, manager of the TMK-Ipsco's Blytheville Works plant, said cheap Chinese imports "started ballooning" just as the market for the tubes made at his factory started drying up.
Coils of the steel from the Nucor plant next door are cut into sections in one of the TMK plant's three factory floors. Long sections of the steel are heated up and rolled into tubes at 300 feet of tubing per minute.
Water is pumped into the tubes at 10,000 pounds per square inch to test their soundness. Welds are checked with ultrasound equipment before the tubes are moved along the line to cutting machines, wherethey are chopped into sections before being loaded onto either trucks or train cars.
In the company's newest addition to the plant, a $50 million heat-treatment facility, Anthony Brown watches the action from a glass-enclosed control room. Using one of three huge television monitors, he can inspect the progress of the glowing-hot orange tubes as they are heated up to 1,600 degrees.
He can toggle the cameras, located throughout the building, with a joystick. Dipping his head to one side, he speaks into a microphone strapped to his shoulder and alerts one of the few workers on the line in this automated factory to a problem.
"Sometimes the pipe doesn't want to roll good," he said.
In the past two years, the plant, which employs 330 workers when at full capacity, has laid off more than one third ofits work force. The workweek has been cut to 24 hours. That, Giesbrecht said, means the newly completed heat-treatment plant has yet to reach its full potential.
"We had to pull the throttle back before the wheels got rolling," he said.
In July, the International Trade Commission ruled unanimously that there is a "reasonable indication," that the U.S. oil-tube industry, which employs about 5,500 workers, is threatened by unfair Chinese imports.
Unlike the Cooper Tire case, which awaits a decision by President Barack Obama, the oil-tube case is a traditional dumping case, meaning it is up to the Commerce Department to decide whether to impose fees on the incoming Chinese product.
A preliminary decision is expected by Sept. 15.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 08/30/2009