More than 250 former Geneva steel workers filled a federal courtroom and most of the adjacent hallway Friday for closing arguments in their lawsuit against USX.
In a characteristically passionate summation, attorney Gerry Spence accused USX of engineering a premature closure of the Geneva Steel Works to cheat workers out of $87 million in benefits.Spence, a flamboyant Wyoming attorney with a national reputation, is representing hundreds of former workers in their legal quest to recover benefits they lost when the plant closed in 1986.
The case of Pickering et al vs. USX went to trial before U.S. District Chief Judge Bruce S. Jenkins on March 19. After more than two months of hearings, the questioning of dozens of witnesses and the introduction of thousands of documents, attorneys on both sides had their final say Friday. Jenkins took the case under advisement.
USX lawyers have maintained throughout the trial that the closure of Geneva was part of a $1.2 billion corporate restructuring that involved 10 steel plants and more than 6,500 employees nationwide.
When USX attorney Gordon L. Roberts first presented his case in March, he said it was ludicrous to suggest that a company decision of that magnitude was implemented simply to "euchre a few benefits" out of its Geneva workers.
He and other company lawyers reiterated that position throughout the trial and in their closing comments, citing huge financial losses USX suffered in the years preceding the corporate restructuring. USX and the steel industry in general were producing more steel than the market could bear and yet plant utilization was low, they argued.
Faced with that scenario and no economic resurgence in sight, the decision was made to close the least productive, most antiquated facilities, including the plant in Orem.
USX lawyers said the Steelworkers Union was intimately involved in all of the negotiations on the future of Geneva and that the company misled no one about its plans.
But Spence maintains that while company officials were assuring workers that the plant would remain operational until 1989, they had already decided to shut it down in order to reap benefits that would otherwise go to 1,749 employees.
"You knew it!" he shouted at the USX officials in the courtroom Friday.
With many of his clients straining to hear him from the hallway, Spence accused company officials of "building a file" of rationalizations and superficial studies to support a decision that they knew would be challenged some day.
As far as USX was concerned, Spence said, "Morality is out, honesty is out, decency is out . . . everything is out. The only thing that's in is profit."
In 1987, USX sold the Geneva Works to Basic Manufacturing and Technology, which modernized the plant and resumed steelmaking operations.