Good morning Chairman Koplan and members of the Commission. For the record, my name is Mark Glyptis, and I have been the President of the Independent Steelworkers Union at Weirton Steel Corporation since 1991.

We have nearly 3,800 members and we represent all hourly, salary non-exempt, and professional unit employees.

I have been employed at Weirton Steel Corporation since 1973, and I am the third generation in my family to work at Weirton Steel. Actually, it is quite common to see many third and fourth generation steelworkers at Weirton Steel.

I am very proud to be joined today by George Becker, President of the United Steelworkers of America. The USWA represents all of the workers at the other companies in the United States producing tin and chromium-coated steel.

I don't know why other tin producing companies have not joined us in this case, but I can point out with pride that 100% of the workers in this industry are represented before you today.

As workers, we cannot be involved in the politics of pressure from customers or in the politics of acquisition. Instead, we must fight unfair imports which threaten the existence of our members' jobs.

As you may already know, Weirton Steel as we know it today, began life as an independent company in 1984 when we became an employee-owned company.

When National Steel announced plans to shut down its Weirton Steel Division in 1983, the workers, their families, and the Ohio Valley community joined forces to save our steel mill.

Thanks to Senator Robert C. Byrd and then Governor Jay Rockefeller, as well as the late Congressman Robert Mollohan, we were able to organize the first major industrial employee stock ownership plan purchase and in 1984, the employees of Weirton Steel became 100% owners of our steel mill.

Since Weirton Steel Corporation was reborn in 1984, the employee-owners have made incredible commitments to improving productivity. We have traded 75% of our ownership position in the Company for equity to invest in the plant. And we borrowed nearly $500 million.

Since 1984, the employee-owners of Weirton Steel have invested more than one billion dollars in our own plant. This may be the most money invested in any single steel plant in the United States during the past 20 years.

The result, as I know many of the members of the Commission and the staff have personally seen, is a world class facility in Weirton, West Virginia. But no amount of investment and no amount of cost reduction and especially no more employee sacrifices can make us competitive with dumped imports from Japan.

As the Commission can see in our questionnaire response, we have well over 450 fewer workers engaged in production of tin mill products at Weirton Steel. Approximately one third of this reduction has come from increased productivity efficiencies. However, the other two thirds is directly related to decreased production caused by the volume we lost to increased imports from Japan.

It is extremely imperative for Weirton's financial health and the employment health of our union workers that we be able to increase our production of tin and chrome-coated steel.

Just last year nearly one-third of our workforce was on layoff status. Through a long, tough struggle we have brought those union workers back to their jobs.

We now stand on the brink of actually hiring new workers for the second half of this year, but that is only because of the imposition of the dumping duties against imports from Japan which began in April.

If you pull the rug out from under us, these new orders will be switched back to the Japanese. That will have a devastating effect in plans to hire new workers and may mean layoffs in the future.

At the Commission Conference last November, I heard comments from some of our customers criticizing our delivery performance. These problems stemmed directly from the difficulties in running Weirton Steel on one blast furnace with supplemental slab purchases.

After a very successful start-up of a second blast furnace last December, we believe our on-time delivery performance has been better than 95% throughout 2000, and we continue to aim for 100% on-time delivery performance. Yet our domestic shipments in the first quarter this year were lower than last year as our customers continue to buy dumped Japanese imports.

I would also like to make a comment from the Union's perspective on the issue of contracts for our tin mill products.

As Mr. Scott testified earlier today, the contracts we have with our customers are obviously not very enforceable. For example, one of our customers who has a plant on our site has a contract with us that forbids the use of imported tin products without Weirton's consent.

That Company has a witness here today. But in spite of this contract provision and without ever obtaining permission from Weirton, I watched as Japanese tin plate was unloaded at this facility on our property.

If these contracts were enforceable, I guess we would have gone to court after damages. Our contract with other customers doesn't mean much when our customers can buy good quality dumped Japanese steel delivered to Weirton, West Virginia for less than we can supply it from a warehouse literally right next door to their can making facility.

We are asking the Commission to restore fair trade so that our workers can get back to work and our Company can survive.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear here before you today.

In conclusion, I ask the Commission to hear the voices of the Union workers at Weirton Steel. We are working hard at being the most efficient steelworkers in the world. Please give us a chance at survival.