[Excerpt] In the past year the steel companies have mounted a tremendous publicity campaign to get the public to believe that labor costs are at the root of the industry's problems. No aspect of the companies' argument is trickier than their presentation of "the facts" on this subject. It has taken MCLR a while to disentangle the facts from the tortured interpretations put on them by the companies, interpretations which have been thoughtlessly repeated by the media. We are preparing a comprehensive analysis of labor costs and productivity in the steel industry for the next issue of Labor Research Review. In the meantime, we present here some brief notes on some of the companies' tricks.