Kaiser turns 80 as aluminum demand reaches new heights

Born out of a nation's need for lightweight metal to create the aircraft it needed to wage war, Spokane Valley's aluminum legacy was created when the U.S. government built the Trentwood Rolling Mill in 1942.

That legacy changed on April 1, 1946, when industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who started his career in Spokane and later mastered his organizational skills by quickly building ships to support the nation's war effort, leased Trentwood and smelters in Mead and Tacoma to form a company he called Kaiser Aluminum.

Still bearing that name 80 years later, the Trentwood Rolling Mill continues to turn massive plates of aluminum used in airplanes and the aerospace industry.

In fact, one could argue that through eight decades, which included a prolonged worker lockout and strike, the smelter closures, a bankruptcy and later resurgence, the outlook for the Trentwood Rolling Mill has never been better.

The company this past week announced its earnings for the first quarter of 2026. The numbers were good.

For the first three months of this year, Kaiser - which has 13 plants across the U.S. and is now based in Franklin, Tennessee - posted net sales of $1.1 billion after shipping 294 million pounds of aluminum. That compared to $777 million in net sales from 276 million pounds of aluminum shipped during the same period in 2025.

As a result, the company's stock is trading at a record price.

At the end of trading Friday, Kaiser stock (KALU) sold for $177.86, which set a new all-time high, besting its high earlier this month of $177.23. For the year to date, Kaiser stock is up more than $43.5%.

"Demand is as strong as we've ever seen it," Keith A. Harvey, Kaiser president and CEO, told analysts in an earnings call Thursday. "I would say, at this point, we're ramping along nicely and should continue to see growth throughout the quarter to the balance of the year."

Joe Schwindt, president of the United Steelworkers Local 338, said a healthy Kaiser means job security for about 850 workers at the Trentwood Rolling Mill and another 110 union members who work at Kaiser Alutek, at 3401 N. Tschirley Road, in Spokane Valley.

"Obviously, when things are going well, they are hiring," said Schwindt, who started working at Kaiser 16 years ago. "For every steelworker that Kaiser employs, it actually creates three to four jobs out in the community because Kaiser always tries to get contracts and work with local companies."

The union signed a new five-year contract with Kaiser officials that took effect last October. Schwindt, who no longer works at the mill as he handles full-time union duties, said the relationship between the company and workers remains strong.

"I travel the country being a union official," he said. "What has been cultivated here is really, really rare to find. We make sure the company is successful so these jobs still exist."

The jobs pay well and remain one of the few that offer a pension, or money set aside by the company that is paid to the workers after they retire.

"We know the impact. Everything from car dealers to restaurants benefit from this," Schwindt said. "So many jobs exist because of Kaiser Aluminum."

Spokane's American dream

After Word War II, Kaiser Aluminum became the largest base of manufacturing jobs in the Spokane region.

That economic engine churned out thousands of blue-collar paychecks that paid for homes, new cars, college educations for workers' children and vacations for two generations.

Workers at Mead would use vast amounts of electricity to turn refined ore into aluminum, which was then heated and trucked in molten-liquid form to the Trentwood Rolling Mill, located on about 60 acres of land just west of Sullivan Road near the Spokane River.

That manufacturing model lasted more than 50 years until labor tensions became strained in 1998. On Sept. 30 that year, about 2,900 United Steelworkers went on strike from five Kaiser plants in Washington, Ohio and Louisiana.

In 1999, the strike transitioned into a worker lockout by the company.

After federal regulators ruled that Kaiser illegally locked out the workers, they were finally able to return on Oct. 23, 2000. But the victory was short-lived.

Just a couple months later, Kaiser idled the Mead smelter, which eliminated about 500 jobs, after the company determined it could make more money selling the smelter's low-cost allotment of electricity than running the plant.

Just two years after the Mead closure, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2002.

Two years after that, the federal government agreed to assume $555 million to help cover the cost of Kaiser's underfunded pensions for thousands of Steelworkers, including retirees, laid-off employees and those still working.

But things started to turn for the company in 2006 when it clawed its way out of bankruptcy.

The company also spent about $240 million retooling it processes at the Trentwood Rolling Mill that, according to Schwindt, set the company up for the successes it now enjoys some 20 years later.

Up until the early 2000s, Kaiser produced an array of aluminum goods including cans, sheets of various thicknesses for parts machining, radiators, truck wheels and even aluminum foil.

But the company decided to home in on specific applications at Trentwood plant to cater to high-end clients, said Kevin Barron, vice president of Kaiser's Trentwood Manufacturing.

"If it was aluminum, we were trying to make it," Barron said. "As the corporation pondered, 'How are we going to win in our spaces?' we became focused. That allowed us to become focused on heat treated products. It was a good move."

Since about 2004, Trentwood began isolating its market to aerospace and airline applications, which require highly specialized aluminum that is strengthened through a specific heating process.

It also produces engineered aluminum that can then be used in other milled applications, such as parts used in radar stations.

"We are as big a player in defense as we are in commercial," Barron said. "If it's going to fly, it's going to have Kaiser aluminum, more than likely. For the past 22 years, that's been a really successful story for the facility."

What Trentwood makes

While the Pacific Northwest's smelters are now closed, companies like Kaiser get most of the aluminum they manufacture from recycling, Schwindt said.

The company uses electricity to heat scrap and raw aluminum and shapes that molten metal into ingots that can weigh 44,000 pounds.

Those ingots then get re-heated and are sent through a series of processes to create sheets and plates of aluminum for various applications.

"We heat them up and roll them on the hot rolling process, and it goes to our own lab that tests everything," Schwindt said. The aluminum "goes down the hot rolling and into another finishing department where it's heated and stretched for customer specifications."

After the sheets are completed, they are sent through an ultrasound machine to check for defects. If any are found, "we melt her down. We don't send bad metal to anybody," Schwindt said.

Much of the semi-finished product is then trucked to Kaiser Alutek, a cutting facility to shape the aluminum to further specifications required by customers, he said.

"Some of it gets treated, or sanded or sawed to specific customer dimensions ... and shipped out," he said.

Those customized sheets then become parts for airplanes built by Boeing and Airbus or sold to metals company AMI Metals, which last year announced expansion plans for a 12-acre site in Spokane Valley to develop a 101,000-square-foot facility.

In his earnings conference, Harvey, the Kaiser CEO, noted that demand for aluminum in automotive applications has remained strong despite rising inflation that could stall sales.

Neal West, Kaiser's chief financial officer, said on the Thursday conference call that the company revenue from aerospace totaled $131 million for the quarter, which was up by $10 million over 2025.

"Demand across our other aerospace-high-strength applications, including business set, defense and space, remains strong with improving booking rates," West said.

Harvey, the CEO, also said demand from defense contractors is increasing after the start of the conflict in Iran, where the U.S. military now needs to replenish vast stocks of air-defense weapons.

"Defense, in some programs, we expected perhaps a doubling," Harvey said. "We're actually seeing quadrupling of expected demand coming our way. It's a cliché, but we're seeing space take off ... so all these things are hitting around the same time."

Aluminum trickle down

While Kaiser's business outlook continues to improve, the benefits to the Spokane region will also flourish, said Grant Forsyth, the chief economist for Avista Corp.

"It is good news that they are doing relatively well," Forsyth said of Kaiser. "Manufacturing in the U.S. and the region really has been weak. The tariffs have not, at least initially, caused a big surge in manufacturing employment. For the most manufacturers, it has been more negative than positive."

Forsyth moved to Spokane in 1999, which was in the middle of the strike and lockout at Kaiser.

"It had a material negative impact on the region, there is no doubt about it," he said. "Since that time, the region has definitely diversified so that the aluminum industry doesn't have the same weight that it used to."

He noted that even with a robust Kaiser bottom line, manufacturing jobs in the Spokane region dropped by 1% in 2025.

But as a regional manufacturer, Kaiser "still moves the needle," he said.

While the company employs fewer workers than it did 25 years ago, those jobs and local contracts with other businesses continue to provide unseen benefits.

He used the analogy of great downfall of employment in agriculture as an example.

"It's not 1900 when you have a lot of farms and people working in farms. If you look at employment in agriculture today, you might be misled to think it's not an important economic factor in the region," he said.

A manufacturer like Kaiser, and its 1,000 or so jobs, play a similar role.

"First off, they are a massive property owner," Forsyth said. "If they are healthy and operating, the property has value to the region to both the county and city that they are in.

"They may be employing fewer workers, but they are enabled to pay them more," he continued. "That's also a value to think about."

Barron, the local vice president, said his company continues to invest in the Trentwood facility, including a $25 million upgrade last year that allowed it to boost production of the heat-treated aluminum.

"We contribute tens of millions of dollars to the local community from wages and materials we buy and engineering services we pay for," he said. "For us, frankly, we want another 80 years of being a vibrant member of the community."

This story was changed to correct the place where Henry J. Kaiser was born. He was born in Sprout Brook, New York, in 1882, but started his career in Spokane.

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This story was originally published April 26, 2026 at 8:19 AM.