Who is Ron Bloom? (CZAR)

Ron Bloom, whom the Treasury Department is expected to bring in as a senior adviser to help handle the U.S. auto industry’s restructuring, is a special assistant to the president of United Steelworkers union and a former investment banker.

Ron Bloom

Mr. Bloom’s negotiating skills may play a key role in shaping the Obama administration’s policies toward the auto industry. It was reported Sunday that the administration won’t name a single “car czar” to help oversee the restructuring process as originally planned. Instead, President Barack Obama will support a new inter-agency task force to deal with the issue, according to senior administration officials. And Mr. Bloom, in his early fifties, is among the players in the administration’s new strategy.
Mr. Bloom attended Harvard Business School, where he gravitated to populist business cases and was keenly interested in employee buyouts. After 10 years at investment banks, among them Lazard, he became special assistant to the USW president in 1996.
Both inside and outside the USW, Mr. Bloom is known as a financially savvy negotiator — with a tendency to spout profanities. In a 2007 article depicting Mr. Bloom’s role in the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. takeover battle, The Wall Street Journal wrote some USW members thought Mr. Bloom is “too cozy with the moneymen.”
The USW helped block Brazilian steel giant CSN’s attempt to merge with Wheeling-Pitt by finding a more union-friendly bidder in Esmark — a Chicago upstart that got bought by Russia’s OAO Severstal in 2008. In the Wheeling-Pitt case, Mr. Bloom dealt with entrepreneurs who run Esmark as well as with Franklin Mutual Advisers LLC, a big mutual-fund firm that owned 70% of Esmark’s shares. In return for Esmark’s no-layoff promise, the USW agreed not to oppose its wish to import steel slabs to Wheeling-Pitt mills. The union customarily opposes such imports.
In that article, Mr. Bloom was quoted as saying that dealing with financial buyers of steel assets “is just business.” Indeed, he said, in contrast to traditional steel executives, who sometimes want unions “in their place,” talking to private-equity types is refreshing: “They don’t take cultural offense to anything. They just deal with power.”