Retirements are looming at the steel plants along the Lake Michigan shoreline as the baby boomers hired in their late adolescence and early adulthood when the industry was booming begin to qualify for pensions.

It's estimated that more than half of the region's hourly and salaried steel industry workers will be eligible for retirement by 2012, creating plentiful job openings in the coming years.

U.S. Steel Corp.'s Gary Works is seeking 27 salaried employees for a range of positions, and 250 hourly workers, said company spokesman John Armstrong, adding a large number of employees will be eligible to retire in the next five years.

"As the baby boomers begin to reach retirement age over the next three to five years, we expect to see a significant increase in retirements in our employees," Armstrong said. "... During the '80s, when the industry was restructuring, very little hiring occurred, which has created a bubble of older employees."

Although only three hourly jobs at Gary Works are advertised on the company's Web site, the company plans to keep pace with its recent retirement levels by hiring 250 hourly workers in each of the next three or four years, Armstrong said.

The turbulence of the country's steel industry during the 1980s put hiring on hold for almost two decades, said Tom Hargrove, president of United Steelworkers Local 1010 at ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor East. During that time, scores of steel companies either cut payrolls or closed.

"We went for a period of almost 20 years when the mills didn't hire," Hargrove said. "There were a lot of people laid off in the mid- and late-1980s, when the industry fell apart. In 1986, we (workers) had a give-back of $1 an hour, massive layoffs, and we had to forego 13 weeks' vacation."

Some of the workers laid off from what then was Inland Steel Co. weren't recalled for nine years. Currently Local 1010 membership stands at 3,600, a huge drop from its 18,000 members in the early 1980s, he said.

"They were called back in the mid '90s," Hargrove said. "We went from 1986 to 1999 with no new hires."

Currently about 65 percent of the local's members are eligible to take advantage of the mill's defined benefit pension plan, in force since the mill was owned by Inland. The plan allows workers to retire after 30 years on the job, therefore some eligible for retirement could be as young as 48 years of age, Hargrove said.

After 30 years of service and at age 55, workers have a pension benefit of $2,080 monthly, or $24,960 annually, but most aren't inclined to retire if they are able to continue working, he said. Without overtime, workers can earn about $48,000 annually, plus profit-sharing, which could add thousands more.

"They can get almost unlimited overtime," Hargrove said. "They can make $70,000 to $80,000 or more a year depending on how much overtime they take."

Yet there still may be a wholesale exodus from the mill after Jan. 1, when workers are eligible for their 2007 vacations, although others "may hang on to see what the new contract brings," Hargrove said. The contract between the USW and both ArcelorMittal and U.S. Steel Corp. expires Sept. 1.

Pensions are different at ArcelorMittal's other area mills, where the bankruptcies of their former owners wiped out defined pension benefit plans. The plans were taken over by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which often has retirement benefits qualifications and limits that are different from the original plans.

PBGC's benefits for those retiring below the age of 65 can be far less than in the prior plan. For example, a person retiring at age 55 with a straight-life annuity would receive a maximum monthly benefit of $1,856.25, while those retiring at age 65 have a maximum of $4,125 per month.