Leo Gerard, who in his 18 years as president of the United Steelworkers turned it into the largest industrial union in North America while simultaneously working with — and sometimes against — both political parties in confronting the onslaught of cheap steel imports during the 2000s and 2010s, died on Sunday in Sudbury, Ontario. He was 78.
The United Steelworkers, which he ran from 2001 to 2019, announced his death in a statement. A precise location and cause were not provided.
A big, gregarious, thickly mustachioed man who began his career unclogging air pipes at an Ontario nickel smelter, Mr. Gerard was a labor leader seemingly plucked from central casting. After moving from the factory to the union’s offices in Sudbury in his late 20s, he climbed steadily up the Steelworkers’ ranks and became president in 2001.
He came to office just as Chinese plants were churning out vast amounts of cheap steel — too much for their own domestic demand — and then flooding the global market. Dozens of American and Canadian steel makers went bankrupt as a result, and thousands of workers lost their jobs.
Mr. Gerard successfully lobbied the George W. Bush administration to impose anti-dumping tariffs in 2002 while aligning his union with some of American industry’s leading companies to create a unified front. Among other steps, he helped create the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a Washington-based group that pushes for a coordinated industrial policy of trade protections and domestic investment.
While there are many reasons that American politics and policymaking have turned away from its earlier bipartisan, pro-free-trade orthodoxy, Mr. Gerard’s constant pressure on politicians in Washington certainly made a difference.
“It’s ironic that it took a Canadian to show Americans the need for an industrial policy,” Scott Paul, the president of the alliance, said in an interview.
Mr. Gerard greatly expanded his union’s ranks through mergers, adding large labor groups like the American Flint Glass Workers and the Industrial Wood and Allied Workers of Canada. By the time he retired in 2019, the Steelworkers were the largest industrial union in North America. Today, the union has more than 1.2 million members.
A strong believer in international labor solidarity, Mr. Gerard also built ties to unions in Mexico, Brazil, Australia and Britain.
In 2006, Mr. Gerard led the Steelworkers to create the BlueGreen Alliance, a partnership with the Sierra Club, to push for cleaner manufacturing.
Mr. Gerard was not without his critics — both on the right, who considered him a militant, and on the left, who said he was too close to industry. He dismissed both contentions.
“Some people want to demonstrate their outrage by yelling and screaming at buildings and refusing to acknowledge that competitiveness, productivity or deficits are real issues that require the labor movement’s attention,” he told The Toronto Star in 1994. “Others say we’re going to advance the interests of our members by getting inside the buildings, into the debate.”
There was little doubt which side he was on.
Leo Wilfred Joseph John Gerard was born on March 19, 1947, into a union family in a union town, Creighton Mine, an unincorporated settlement outside Sudbury that was run by Inco, a multinational nickel mining company.
His father, Wilfred Gerard, was a miner and union activist who took his son with him to hand out leaflets and organize workers. His mother, Rita, managed the home.
At 18, Leo went to work in a nickel plant. He was just looking for short-term work to raise money for a car. But he never left.
Instead, he worked his way through college at Laurentian University in Sudbury, where he pursued an economics degree. He also became active in union organizing and was made a shop steward at his plant in 1969.
In 1977, when the chance came to join the union staff full time, he left college a few credits short of his degree. He later returned to complete his studies, and he received an honorary doctorate, also from Laurentian, in 1994.
Mr. Gerard is survived by his wife, Susan; their daughters, Kari-Ann Gerard Cusack and Meaghan Gerard Wennekes; his brother, Ray; and three grandchildren.
Mr. Gerard became the union’s Ontario director in 1985. In that position, he oversaw improvements in nickel-worker pensions, helped lead a provincewide strike and organized a bailout for a struggling steel maker that resulted in the union’s owning 60 percent of it.
He also pushed many of the union’s older white male leaders into early retirement while opening the doors to women and immigrants, who he believed were critical to the future of organized labor.
When the Steelworkers’ national director, Gerard Docquier, resigned in 1991, Mr. Gerard took his place. Two years later, he moved to Pittsburgh to become secretary-treasurer for the entire union.
Even through his years at the head of the Steelworkers, which had him negotiating with titans of industry and presidents, Mr. Gerard insisted on his blue-collar roots. On his office wall, he hung a photo of himself, much younger, being pressed against a car by a police officer during a labor protest.
“I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2001. “But my job is to stand in front of the workers. I was born into a union family, this is all I know.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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