Union leaders and Severstal officials are continuing to negotiate a contract for Mountain State Carbon workers.

Even though Mountain State and the United Steelworkers union had a contract in the past, the parties must renegotiate because of RG Steel's bankruptcy.

Mountain State was previously a joint venture between Severstal and RG Steel. Now with RG Steel out of the picture, the old contract is gone and the union is essentially negotiating with a new owner.

United Steelworkers Local 1190 President Ernie Gambellin said the two sides have only met on about three occasions in about six weeks. Gambellin said that hasn't been enough to come up with a bargaining agreement between the union and Severstal.

"I'm not confident that meaningful negotiations are happening at this time being the amount of times we have met," Gambellin said. "When RG Steel defaulted on their agreement, ... that put Severstal in control of Mountain State Carbon and Severstal was not part of any negotiations. Severstal is actually is looking at themselves as a brand-new company."

Severstal hired 200 steelworkers to keep operations going at Mountain State, but they're not running at full capacity.

"The people who are working there now are assigned to work as at-will employees and they will be at-will employees until a collective bargaining with the United Steelworkers is reached," Gambellin said.

He said that the USW and Local 1190 negotiating team has made themselves readily available seven days a week throughout the process with Severstal.

"Not that contract talks have gone bad at this point. I don't think anything bad has happened. It's just (that with) the amount of negotiations we've had, we haven't been able to get ourselves a contract," he said.

The plant manager of Mountain State Carbon – Dave Fish – told NEWS9 on Tuesday that the company has no comment.

Both sides are scheduled to meet for talks again next Friday, Oct. 19.

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