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The United Steelworkers would not take “shut” for an answer.

Steelworkers demonstrated, petitioned, held press conferences, conducted candlelight vigils, demanded studies, pestered lawmakers, organized meetings and ultimately helped save about 1,200 good-paying refinery jobs, create 1,000 construction jobs and produce 200 new permanent jobs.

Those jobs are at two of three Philadelphia refineries given death sentences last fall. The Steelworkers sought reprieves for all three. The score so far: two preserved, one more to save.

In a conference call last week to announce that a joint venture between Sunoco and The Carlyle Group would preserve and expand the largest of the three refineries, officials acknowledged the Steelworkers’ efforts as crucial to the deal. It’s hard for Fox-News-watching-Tea-Party-saluting-rabid-right-wingers to hear that a union is a job creator. Especially when those words come from the mouths of CEOs and private equity partners. But that’s what they said. And that’s what actually happened.

This saga started sadly last fall. ConocoPhillips and Sunoco announced they would close their three Eastern Pennsylvania refineries – Marcus Hook, Philadelphia and Trainer. Processing expensive light, sweet crude oil, the three were losing money.

ConocoPhillips closed Trainer in September. Sunoco closed Marcus Hook in December. And Sunoco said it would shut the Philadelphia refinery if a buyer weren’t found by July. That would be a total of 2,200 workers out of jobs at the three plants, 1,200 of them represented by the USW. The Steelworkers refused to accept that as inevitable.

The union launched what would become a massive campaign to save the three refineries. Steelworkers enlisted support from lawmakers who initially weren’t paying attention. This included Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, whose mansion was the site of a USW candlelight vigil; congressional representatives, subjected to relentless USW phone calls, and the White House, whose top economic advisor heard Steelworker pleas.

The USW contention that loss of the refineries was too economically devastating to ignore got empirical support from the Pennsylvania Center for Workforce Information and Analysis. It calculated that if the three refineries closed, job losses could reach 36,000 and cities, school districts and the state could lose $560 million in tax revenues. The U.S. Department of Energy warned that the closures could cause gasoline and fuel oil shortfalls and price spikes.

Steelworkers posted yard signs, secured a Congressional hearing, organized massive rallies at Marcus Hook and in Washington, D.C., and searched for potential buyers. (more…)

The chair of Sunoco’s board of directors is a refinery assassin.

Lynn Laverty Elsenhans, who will remain Sunoco chair until May, tried to kill off a Shell refinery in Bakersfield, Calif., when she was CEO at Shell Oil Products. At Sunoco, where she was CEO until March 1, she succeeded in snuffing out its Marcus Hook refinery in Eastern Pennsylvania in December. And Elsenhans orchestrated the demise of Sunoco’s massive Philadelphia refinery, scheduling its lethal ejection for June.

Joining her in refinery extermination is ConocoPhillips and Hovensa. ConocoPhillipa silenced its Trainer refinery near Philadelphia late last year. And in February, Hovensa offed a large St. Croix refinery that provided fuel to the Northeast.

As fuel prices rise, these companies are closing the very facilities essential for producing fuels. It raises the question: why would corporations do that? It’s a mystery that U.S. Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., announced on Friday he will try to solve with a Congressional hearing scheduled for April. Maybe then the Northeast will know if the community suffering, the worker layoffs and the projected East Coast shortages and skyrocketing rates are really unavoidable.

The cost of the refinery closings to the region is appalling. The Pennsylvania Center for Workforce Information & Analysis has estimated job losses could reach 36,000, and cities, school districts and the state could lose $560 million in tax revenues. The U.S. Department of Energy has warned that if Sunoco closes its Philadelphia refinery as planned in June, the Northeast could be subjected to gasoline and fuel oil shortfalls and price spikes.

ConocoPhillips said it had to close the Trainer refinery not because it was losing money but because of the “level of investment required to remain competitive.” Sunoco claimed it lost money at the Marcus Hook and Philadelphia refineries over the past three years.

Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. That’s what Shell said in 2004 about the Bakersfield, Calif., refinery when it announced it would close that facility supposedly because it “couldn’t reach financial targets.”

Elsenhans, then chief executive of Shell Oil Products, contended there was no point in trying to sell the Bakersfield refinery because any potential buyer would reach the same conclusion she had – that it wasn’t viable. She refused to hire a broker to try to sell the asset.

California officials didn’t swallow that corporate line of bull. Jobs and fuel price hikes were at stake. U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, then-state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and consumer groups challenged Elsenhans’ assertions. Already burned by extraordinarily high gasoline prices and the Enron energy price manipulation scheme, they weren’t going to take it anymore.

Lockyer suggested Shell planned to close the refinery in the nation’s most lucrative fuel market so that it could jack up prices even further. He and other critics said closing Bakersfield would cause shortages that would increase prices, which in turn would boost profit for Shell refineries in Wilmington and Martinez. (more…)