The USWA members from Titan Tire in Des Moines, Iowa, and Natchez, Mississippi, joined eight locked-out workers at AK Steel in Mansfield, Ohio, for two days of activities here. Titan workers have been on strike since May 1998. AK Steel locked out more than 600 union members in September.

Steelworkers from AK got out information about their fight at the North American International Auto Show and joined Titan strikers to protest at offices and companies owned by Maurice Taylor, president and chief operating officer of Titan International Inc., and Anthony Soave, a Detroit area boss who has invested more than $5 million in Titan stock since the strike began. They also joined newspaper workers and others for a picket of the Detroit News and Free Press offices. Some 600 out of 2,500 workers who struck the two newspapers in 1995 remain locked out.

On January 22, 75 union supporters gathered in single digit temperatures at a shop owned by Taylor's wife, Michelle, another Titan stockholder, in downtown Grosse Pointe Farms. The steelworkers and others marched the mile and a half to Soave's lakefront mansion and to the gates of the private community in which the Taylors reside.

John Sarge is a member of United Auto Workers Local 900 in Wayne, Michigan.  
 
 
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