PITTSBURGH (TNS) — I’ve heard more times than I can count that the United Steelworkers union was responsible for the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh. Whatever challenges heavy manufacturing was experiencing, the argument goes, it was the union’s demands that finally did in the great companies that built this city and the modern world.

Not only is this balderdash, but in many cases it was intentional balderdash. This argument, made largely by devotees of the so-called free market, effectively obscured the fact that it was the free market itself — and more specifically, America’s embrace of a global free market where its workers and interests could be undercut — that ended the Steel City as we knew it. It became the accepted wisdom.

While the union’s insistence on acting as if the world hadn’t changed between 1947 and 1977 didn’t help matters, it also represented something noble: the idea that that world — the post-war era when a union steelworker could raise a family and live comfortably and confidently for as many years as God gave him — was worth fighting for, even if the fight was doomed from the beginning.

But the world has changed again, and the last vestiges of Pittsburgh steel are being threatened again. But this time, neither the union nor those following its lead are fighting for anything but themselves.

Reporting from the Post-Gazette’s Evan Robinson-Johnson has helped us understand why so many people who should know better — including the incoming and outgoing presidents — have opposed, or failed to support, Nippon Steel’s bid to purchase U.S. Steel: The USW has connived with Ohio-based steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs to pressure public officials against the deal.

It’s really simple: Cleveland-Cliffs doesn’t want to have to compete with Nippon Steel. The USW — led by David McCall, who worked at Cleveland-Cliffs — also doesn’t want Cleveland-Cliffs (which has 14,000 union members to U.S. Steel’s 11,000) to have to compete with Nippon Steel. And so they’ve created and spread the false narrative that the deal threatens American interests, and workers’ interests, not to mention national security, when it only threatens their own corporate interests.

McCall is looking out for the Steelworkers, not actual steelworkers.

Meanwhile, local public officials and hundreds of union workers actually living and working in the Mon Valley have pleaded with the people who are supposed to represent them to look beyond the union’s claims. But more distant public officials have proven more interested in appearing to support the USW than actually supporting Pittsburgh workers.

Everyone who’s supposed to have Pittsburgh’s best interests at heart has failed to deliver.

Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato — who has understood the assignment as the county’s top official much better than many people, myself included, expected — hasn’t said a word in favor of a deal that every analyst and observer agrees is the only chance to save thousands of jobs in her county.

Gov. Josh Shapiro has maintained strategic ambiguity about the deal, never explicitly opposing it — and doing some things to help it along, like securing a promise to keep Nippon’s North American headquarters in Pittsburgh — but also never explicitly endorsing it. This means he didn’t give cover to other officials to stand up to the union.

The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which is supposed to advance Pittsburgh’s economic and social competitiveness, only released a couple statements in support of Nippon many months into the process, and hasn’t done anything visible to make anyone care about its position.

Let’s state this plainly: There is no future for steelmaking in Pittsburgh without Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel. No American steel company, including U.S. Steel itself, has the resources or the incentives to invest in the Andrew Carnegie-era operations that make up the Mon Valley Works, and bring them up to modern standards.

Without the deal, the roughly 3,000 jobs associated with U.S. Steel and Mon Valley Works will disappear. Besides those jobs, many of which involve skills that are not easily transferrable in a post-industrial economy, many more are dependent on the last remnants of steel manufacturing: from railroading to neighborhood bars and restaurants to suppliers and clients of U.S. Steel.

The Pittsburgh region can survive without steel, but it will be diminished — not just as a matter of identity but as a matter of competitiveness, especially as industrial policy and re-industrialization are suddenly in vogue in Washington.

Something that has distinguished Pittsburgh for generations, at least as much as steel itself, has been the willingness of its public and private sector leaders to fight bitterly for our industries’ interests. The message that’s being sent now? Outside forces can connive to deprive the region of thousands of jobs and a major role in American industry, and no one with political power in Pittsburgh or the commonwealth will stand in the way.

It’s exactly what Cleveland-Cliffs and its vassal, the USW under David McCall’s leadership, want to see. But it represents a humiliating surrender for the Steel City.

(Brandon McGinley is the editorial page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)

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