Published on 2026-02-20 by Eleanor Steffen
In the first week of the Minnesota legislative session, lawmakers moved to help struggling Iron Range workers by extending unemployment benefits.
HF3393, sponsored by Rep. Spencer Igo, Wabana Township, offers an additional six months of unemployment benefits to Iron Range mining employees laid off between January 15 and March 15 of this year.
The bill follows the Feb. 1 layoffs of 45 employees of Hibbing Taconite in Hibbing. The iron ore mine is owned by Cleveland-Cliffs, an Ohio-based steel manufacturer that idled roughly 600 employees from both Hibbing Taconite and the Minorca Mine in Virginia, Minn., a year earlier in March 2025.
One big reason Minnesota mines are struggling is weak demand for new cars, according to Cleveland-Cliff’s chairman, president and chief executive officer Lourenco Gonclaves in a press release this month.
Cleveland-Cliffs laid off roughly 3,500 employees nationwide in 2025, according to a Yahoo Finance article from Feb. 10.
“We took the necessary actions in 2025 to set us up for future success,” Gonclaves said.
President Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imported steel have in turn raised the cost of domestic steel.
John Arbogast, a United Steelworkers representative and resident of Virginia, testified at the Wednesday meeting of the Minnesota House Workforce, Labor and Economic Development Committee that Cleveland-Cliffs has struggled more than their competitor U.S. Steel due to a surplus of iron ore pellets and a commitment to domestic sales.
“It’s not good news at U.S. Steel either, it’s just better news than Cleveland-Cliffs,” Arbogast said.
Minnesota is the leading source of iron in the country, producing about 85% of the iron used in domestic steel production, according to the Iron Mining Association of Minnesota. Primary industry competitors U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs produce 87% of the state’s iron ore.
This is not the first time legislation of this nature has crossed the desk of Minnesota lawmakers. Hibbing Mayor Pete Hyduke called the bill a near “carbon copy” of HF3023, a bill passed in May 2025 that extended unemployment benefits to the roughly 600 mining employees let go in the Iron Range.
“When the mining industry struggles, every Iron Range community feels it,” Hyduke said.
For eligible workers, the additional benefits will be available through March 19, 2027. The committee approved the bill extending benefits and sent it to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Igo commended the people of the Iron Range who continued to show up for one another, providing for those facing the difficult decision of waiting out the storm or packing up and moving toward something new.
“You will never see a community that’s more knit and tied together than they are right now,” Igo said. “People are taking care of people and they’re looking out for each other.”
Report for Minnesota is a project of the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication to support local news across the state.