Roxanne Brown's journey to leading the United Steelworkers union didn't start in the heat and deafening noise of a steel mill.
Instead, she spent more than two decades in Washington, D.C., advocating for the union's policy priorities on trade, domestic manufacturing and workers' rights.
That experience is due to come in handy, people around Brown say, now that the modern USW covers a spectrum of 850,000 cradle-to-grave workers from maternity nurses to casket makers.
"We're all interconnected," said Brown, 47 years old, who earlier this year became the first woman and the first Black person to lead the USW. "Our members in healthcare understand that if a steel mill goes down, it's not just the jobs in that steel mill that are impacted. The loss of tax base and economic activity from those jobs will impact the hospital funding."
Brown's one-for-all messaging to USW members is already being tested.
More than 800 union workers have been locked out of oil company BP's Whiting, Ind., refinery since March after rejecting the company's contract offer. The union last week began new contract negotiations with steelmakers Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel, whose Northwest Indiana mills are nearly next door to BP's refinery.
Priorities for Brown: halting further job losses and plant closings at the companies and preserving benefits, particularly fully paid health insurance coverage for union workers.
The negotiations are the union's first with U.S. Steel's new owner, Nippon Steel. Brown's predecessor, Dave McCall, opposed last year's $14.1 billion purchase, saying Nippon Steel shouldn't be trusted to maintain U.S. Steel's plants.
The union's attitude toward Nippon Steel has evolved considerably. The Tokyo-based company committed $11 billion to upgrade existing plants in exchange for the Trump administration's approval of the purchase.
The investment will likely keep unionized plants in Gary, Ind., and near Pittsburgh in service for decades longer. Union negotiators are expected to press the company to commit to more spending at unionized plants.
During the last negotiations in 2022, U.S. Steel's acquisition of a nonunion steel mill in Arkansas was a sore spot for the union that lingered for years. This time around, Brown said she has had productive discussions with U.S. Steel Chief Executive David Burritt -- who engineered that deal -- and Nippon Steel Vice Chairman Takahiro Mori, who had a fraught relationship with McCall.
"That's lived history. That's done," she said of the union's opposition to the sale. "Nippon Steel now owns U.S. Steel. What serves us now is bargaining a good contract."
Burritt said he considers Brown "a breath of fresh air" for the union's relationship with U.S. Steel.
"I'm really happy to work with her," he said in an interview. "We don't have to agree on everything. When we disagree, we're going to get things on the table."
'What the members are banking on'
U.S. Steel and Cliffs are the largest unionized steel companies in the U.S., with about 20,000 USW members -- down from more than 30,000 workers eight years ago.
As the union seeks to claw back jobs, Brown was the unanimous choice of its executive committee to lead. She has so far avoided the high profile of more bombastic labor leaders like the United Auto Workers' Shawn Fain or Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. Some U.S. Steel workers who backed Nippon Steel's purchase of the company still feel estranged from the union's leadership more than a year after the sale.
"She's going to have to get the trust of the steelworkers," said Richard Tikey, a union local vice president at the coking coal plant for U.S. Steel's Mon Valley Works south of Pittsburgh. He said the union should have pushed for additional benefits or a new contract during the sale process. "The union had more leverage then," Tikey said.
U.S. Steel's initial proposal included an 18.2% pay increase over five years and a $4,000 contract bonus, but would implement employee copays for health insurance.
Union negotiators said this was insufficient. They will counter in August.
The union is expected to push to pause additional plant closings, starting with U.S. Steel's Granite City, Ill., mill. That mill started making steel again this year after sitting idle since 2023 but could still close in 2027 under Nippon Steel's agreement with the federal government. About 1,200 people now work at the plant.
"Every expectation we have is for those jobs to continue into the future, " Brown said. "It's what the members are banking on."
Decline, and attempted comeback
Colleagues describe Brown as charismatic and intelligent. She brings a change in tone compared with her grizzled predecessors, like Leo Gerard, the union's longest-serving president.
"Leo used to tell me, 'Kid, I have boots older than you,'" Brown said.
"She really relates so well to our members and understands the needs of our members and their desire for security," Brown's predecessor McCall said. "I don't think there was any question on the executive board who ought to be the union's 10th international president."
Her own life reflects a changing American workforce once dominated by men.
Brown was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and came to the U.S. when she was 2 years old. She and her brother were raised by her mother and aunt in White Plains, N.Y. Her mother worked as a nurse at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, where she belonged to a union, and her aunt was a union member at Westchester Medical Center.
"I was raised by strong, single women in my family. My husband calls them the generals," Brown said.
She wanted to be a lawyer and enrolled in Howard University, but dropped out when she ran out of money. In need of a job, the 19-year-old Brown applied for a clerical position at the union's Washington, D.C., office. She joined the staff in early 1999, answering phones and doing data entry.
Brown later moved into lobbying and union policy. She witnessed the collapse of the unionized steel industry in the early 2000s, when more than two dozen companies filed for bankruptcy under the weight of huge pension obligations and low steel prices.
The decline cost the union tens of thousands of jobs and allowed nonunion companies with newer, lower-cost mills to dominate the industry.
In the aftermath, Brown worked on the Blue Green Alliance between the USW and environmental groups that aimed to align manufacturers with environmentally sustainable industries. She spent years advocating for tax credits for investments in job creation, renewable energy and the related supply chain. Many of the alliance's policy tenets were rolled into 2022's Inflation Reduction Act.
Today, the market for domestic steel is the strongest since the manufacturing frenzy that followed the Covid-19 pandemic. Union members say they expect company negotiators will try to avoid drawn-out bargaining that would create uncertainty for customers.
"Because it's the first contract with Nippon Steel, they'd like to have a quick signing and smooth transition," said Andrew Macey, a worker at Mon Valley's coke plant.
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