THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Otherwise please clean out your locker and make sure we have the correct address for your last paycheck. Another industry that Cheeto Mussolini promised to be good for is experiencing another round of layoffs because of increased foreign imports and lack of demand.

At this sprawling steel mill on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the workers have one number in mind. Not how many tons of steel roll off the line, or how many hours they work, but where they fall on the plant’s seniority list.

In September, ArcelorMittal, which owns the mill, announced that it would lay off 150 of the plant’s 207 workers next year. While the cuts will start with the most junior employees, they will go so deep that even workers with decades of experience will be cast out.

“I told my son, ‘Christmas is going to be kind of scarce, because mommy’s going to lose her job soon,’” said Kimberly Allen, a steelworker and single parent who has worked at the plant for more than 22 years. On the seniority list, she’s 72nd.

Foreign steel makers have rushed to get their product into the United States before tariffs start. According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, which tracks shipments, steel imports were 19.4 percent higher in the first 10 months of 2017 than in the same period last year.

That surge of imports has hurt American steel makers, which were already struggling against a glut of cheap Chinese steel. When ArcelorMittal announced the layoffs in Conshohocken, it blamed those imports, as well as low demand for steel for bridges and military equipment.

James Rockas, a spokesman for the Commerce Department, said the administration was “aware of the plight of American steel workers and will continue working to halt unfair trade practices that harm our economy and kill American jobs.”

In 2008, before the financial crisis struck, the plant ran around the clock. Now, the mill coughs to life just five days a week, for eight hours at a time. The machines shovel 10-ton steel slabs into a furnace, where they are heated to 2,000 degrees, then funnel them through giant rollers and cooling jets of water, like a massive, fiery carwash.

The plant’s specialty is ultrastrong, military-grade steel

If the much ballyhooed infrastructure improvements had been implemented, the would be demand for steel all around. But having failed to create demand, our Potemkin President also failed to control supply flooding in from overseas. And so another US industry falls by the wayside despite all his Yuge promises. What is most troubling is the plant's specialty, something we can not rely on getting from overseas. But Putin is probably very happy about it.