Kevin Lewis: Yes. Thanks, Emily. It’s a great question. I think it really speaks to the level of cost control, operating efficiencies that we were able to drive within the North American Flat-Rolled segment with a reduced footprint. If you adjust for the two furnaces, both Gary and the Mon Valley, which are temporarily idled, and you look at the applied utilization rate of those furnaces to remain, we are in excess of 80% levels of utilization. So that’s a very healthy level of utilization to run blast furnaces, and our team did an excellent job not only running them safely, but doing it in a very prudent way from a cost perspective. So as utilization rates then increase, at the Mon Valley, as that furnace ramps up, we should see probably some additional cost improvements as well. And we’re certainly focused on driving continued efficiencies and yield improvement, labor productivity, et cetera. So, I think there’s some continued opportunity to lower cost in 2023.
Operator: We’ll now proceed to our next question on the line is from the line of Phil Gibbs with KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
Philip Gibbs: Thanks for taking my question. So, the labor contracts that you talked about, Dave, earlier in your script, can you just discuss a little bit about how you design those with the long-term strategy in mind?
David Burritt: Sure. Thanks for that question, Phil. And the collective bargaining agreement, I would say all things considered went very smoothly. We took the time. We were very purposeful. We had in mind what would the expectations were and we worked very well with — during the USW negotiations, and we felt great that we are able to break away from the pattern, but mostly that was because of the stellar pension that we have, particularly with the Veeva, which was 200% overfunded. Because of the way that operates, you can actually — and I’ll ask Jess to weigh in on this, we can actually make sure that we use those — the cash from the pension that is overfunded to be able to pay for active medical, and then that active medical is reduced.
So that would enable us to provide increases in pay. And so, when we think about the collective bargaining agreements, what we want to do is we want to strive for more variable pay with the philosophy of pay for performance, meaning when we do well, our employees do well. So, we have a bias for profit sharing. In fact, uncapped profit sharing like we’ve had here in the last few years where people can make substantial amounts of money. That’s the model that we have at Big River. And we believe that when you have a variable pay structure, you end up with a much better result for your employees, for your company, and certainly, you can then invest more in innovation to support your customers. So, we’re very pleased with the flexibility working with the USW to get an agreement that works very well for us, very different than the competitor that was first brought to us that plan, but we feel really good about this.
And maybe just a little bit more, Jess, on how the Viva works because we do take a long-term view of this relationship with our employees, as with our customers, as with our stockholders. Jess?
