Cinta Groos
The office of Tata Steel’s powerful works council is tucked away behind the Hoogovens Museum, in an unassuming building that once formed part of the industrial heart of the plant. It was later repurposed. For years now, it has functioned partly as an industrial museum and partly as the domain of the works council.
The building still carries the atmosphere of its final years of production. Tiled walls, a suspended ceiling, and in the corridor a fluorescent strip light that makes it feel like winter even in summer. A few old photographs hang on the wall; stacks of notes lie on the desk.
Cinta Groos shifts her chair slightly as the recorder starts. At first she appears composed, a touch tense. Later she relaxes — and begins to speak, clearly, thoughtfully, with a warmth beneath her words. She has something to say.
Cinta has worked on this site for thirty-five years and has been chair of the Central Works Council since 2021. She took on the role shortly after a high-profile strike that lasted nearly a month, a hard confrontation against drastic plans by the Indian leadership for mass layoffs — a plan she believes the company would not have survived. It led to a conflict of a scale the plant had not seen in decades. Cinta was deeply involved.
After the departure of works council chair Frits van Wieringen, she was unanimously put forward by her colleagues. What she does on a daily basis? She explains it calmly: she leads the works council — a legally mandated body, elected by employees, with local councils in IJmuiden and across downstream companies throughout the Benelux. Above that sits the Central Works Council, which weighs in on decisions shaping the Dutch branch of the global company.
“It’s a triangle,” she says. “Management, the Supervisory Board, and us — so decisions are not only financial, but also grounded in the reality of the workplace.”
It sounds orderly, democratic even. In practice, it demands a great deal.
We briefly move through the company’s history. The merger with British Steel in 1999, which resulted in Corus, she calls “a major mistake”: new layers, an Anglo-Saxon corporate culture, cost-cutting measures passed down to the workforce. This was followed in 2007 by the takeover by India’s Tata Steel.
Meanwhile, the plant continues to operate with tight staffing levels, while the proposed reorganisation, in her view, removes too many people from the system.
“You ask for more performance,” she says, “but you take away hands.”
After several minutes speaking about pressure and plans that struggle to take hold, her voice softens.
“What makes you come here every day?” I ask.
She searches for words; her hands rest quietly on the table.
Then she looks aside, nods — and her eyes begin to glisten. Half-formed tears rise slowly.
“For my colleagues,” she says softly. “That’s why I do it.”
She brushes her cheeks lightly.
For a few seconds, the room hangs still — only the soft hum of the fluorescent light holds the moment in place.
Then she gathers herself. When she speaks again, she searches for words to carry the weight that just surfaced.
“It’s heavy because the world around the company has started speaking louder than the company itself; heavy because a reorganisation is unfolding at the same time; and heavy because trust — both outside and inside — is fragile.
Under that pressure, you have to keep emphasising: the transition to green steel cannot happen without the company. Precisely here, the change we need to make together can be significant.”
Outside the gates, the debate is loud. Cinta is precise in her language. Black snow is not the same as a graphite rain; Harsco has built a facility where slag pots are tipped.
“Details matter,” she says. “Otherwise everything gets thrown onto one pile.”
At the same time, she acknowledges without hesitation that this is not a garden. “Steel production releases all kinds of things. You have to do everything you can to minimise it.”
She reads reports from critical public institutions closely — RIVM, the Dutch Safety Board, the Expert Group on Health in the IJmond — and is particularly frustrated by how single figures are sometimes isolated.
“These are good reports,” she says, “but you can extract twenty thousand different things from them. The frame is often already set.”
She knows that frame: the major polluter.
It sticks, she says, and trust is scarce. Yet her conviction remains firm: the air is genuinely much cleaner than it was decades ago, even if we now understand far better what is harmful to health.
“Once you know, you have to act.”
And in that action, she says, lies precisely the necessity of the company itself.
“There is nowhere else in the world with this level of expertise and infrastructure to replace emissions at the source. This is where it has to happen. Not by pretending you can do without this company.”
When the conversation turns to health, she shifts her chair back slightly again. She does not believe that only outsiders have the right to be concerned.
“We work on safety and dust reduction every single day — better procedures at the coke plants, dust agreements, filters, investments.”
She struggles with activists who want to shut the plant down immediately, and with studies she feels lack nuance. Yet she sees herself as part of the environmental movement.
“Because this is where it has to change. That’s why I’m here.”
She wants the state — ideally as a shareholder — to be much more directly involved in the transition toward a clean-producing plant. Not to turn it into a state-owned company, but to enable faster action when the public interest is at stake.
“In neighbouring countries, things move faster,” she says, “when governments are actively involved.”
At the end, she straightens her back. She does not list promises, nor claim a final truth. What remains is a portrait of a chair that is less a seat of power than a place of friction: between management, unions, workers, residents and politics — and always that material society depends on, moving along its route from liquid to solid.
Steel as weight, and as promise.
In a week, she will leave for Nepal — five weeks in the mountains, away from the site, toward silence and altitude.