EAST CHICAGO | The majority of the 450 workers at ArcelorMittal's Indiana Harbor East No. 4 bar plant will be laid off for two-to-three weeks beginning Sunday.

Tom Hargrove, the president of United Steelworkers Local 1010, said the number of workers who will remain working during the layoff at the No. 4 plant "will be small."

Hargrove, whose local represents the 3,550 workers at Indiana Harbor East, met with the plant workers Thursday.

"Everybody understands it's the economy," he said following one of the three scheduled meetings. "If you don't have the orders, how can you run? People aren't happy but for the most part they understand. Hopefully the Stimulus starts and we start building bridges, and buying steel, buying American and things pick back up."

Indiana Harbor East currently has about 100 hourly workers on voluntary layoff and an additional 16 workers on involuntary layoff, Hargrove said. Thursday, he said there's no way to know if more layoffs are coming or how long they would last.

"From day-to-day, from week-to-week, you never know what's going to happen," Hargrove said. "Consumers aren't spending so places close down, and people get laid off, and spending falls more and there's more layoffs. It's just a chain reaction. Everything ties together. Once the economy picks up, the whole chain will pick up."

The bar company includes an electric furnace, which makes billets from scrap steel, and the 12-inch bar mill that rolls the billets into bars. As a supplier of specialty bar steel to the auto industry for axles and steering linkage, the facility's fate is tightly linked to auto sales.

In an email to The Times, Thursday a workers at the bar plant said there are a lot of hardworking employees there who "really do work an entire 8 hour period, and work hard for the money they receive."

"I am one of those," he said. ".... The people that are going to hurt in all of this, is the people getting laid off with families. It's not the children's fault that their mom/dad doesn't have a job right now."

ArcelorMittal has said it will continue to work with the union to minimize the layoffs affect on the work force.

"The company is being forced to respond to the extraordinary economic environment we are facing," it said in an email to The Times. "We will be carefully monitoring the situation and we look forward to many of our employees returning to work as soon as it is warranted by market conditions."