Cees Dubbelaar
Cees Dubbelaar has worked at Hoogovens since 1988. He was twenty-two when he started, fresh out of technical school, looking for a company where he could grow. A Saturday job first brought him onto the site. He saw the lights in the early morning and realised that work here never stops. He sent out two applications; Hoogovens responded first. “It could have turned out differently.”
He began in shift work at the oxygen steel plant, in the continuous casting section where liquid steel is poured into slabs around twenty centimetres thick and up to two metres wide. He worked there for nearly twenty-seven years, growing with the factory — from the youngest on the floor to team leader. During that time, he saw the work change. The workforce shrank, automation increased. Not everything became easier. Some jobs remain heavy, depending on experience and insight.
Since 2015, he has worked as (deputy) shift supervisor in preparation — where ores and coal come together and the foundation is laid for everything that follows. Cees oversees the whole system: the harbours, the blending yards, the sinter and pellet plants. He knows how compositions must be balanced — manganese, phosphorus, sulphur — everything must stay within margins so installations and environmental systems can handle it.
“Steel is not just steel,” he says. There are hundreds of types, and the raw materials determine what you can produce. At Tata Steel, about a dozen new steel grades are developed each year.
Recent years have been unsettled. Reorganisations follow one another. The role of shift supervisor disappears. Eight hundred jobs are cut. Cees is sixty. He had hoped to finish his career through a phased retirement scheme: working less, transferring knowledge, gradually stepping down. That scheme disappears. So does his role. What replaces it remains unclear.
That stings — precisely because he invested so much. In the company, in the people he works with, in the knowledge required to keep everything running. For him, leadership is more than production. It is about what happens within a team: stress, uncertainty, how a shift is handed over. Human work. “Just talking. How are you doing?”
He worries about knowledge disappearing. Experienced workers leave; expertise walks out the door. New people come in, often without a technical background. That can work, he says, but it takes time. “You can’t write experience down in a manual.”
On the greening of steel production, he is pragmatic. He sees the investments: increasingly large filtration systems, technologies to capture dust and gases.
At the same time, he sees the limitations. Hydrogen requires enormous amounts of energy. Electric furnaces put even more strain on the grid. And not every type of steel can be produced this way. Change is necessary, he believes, but not abruptly. “You don’t transform an industry like this overnight.”
What bothers him most is the lack of long-term vision. Decisions are made in the short term, while this industry requires decades to change. He believes the plant must survive. Steel remains indispensable. Cars, trains, houses, wind turbines — everything begins here.
“The world is made of steel,” he says. “You can’t pretend the problem disappears if you move it out of sight.”
In his own environment, he tries to explain what is happening. What is being done to work more cleanly. That change takes time. His family understands that. He can accept criticism.
What troubles him more is misunderstanding — people judging without knowing what the work actually looks like from the inside.
The conversation ends.
He has to prepare for the afternoon shift.