Oil prices have claimed some significant casualties in the steel industry, as United States Steel Corp. announced plans to temporarily idle its plants in Texas and Ohio and lay off 756 workers.

The collapse in oil prices — the price per barrel dipped below $50 at one point this week — has reduced demand in the oil industry for steel piping and tubes used for oil and gas exploration and drilling, according to International Business Times.

The company will idle one plant in Texas resulting in 142 layoffs and one plant in Ohio, which will cause 614 workers to lose their jobs. The Ohio plant produces 700,777 tons of pipes each year.

The company notified the workers with layoff notices, blaming weak market conditions. The layoffs are expected to begin March 8, and workers will find out exactly who is being laid off during a meeting today.

U.S. Steel had about 26,000 employees in North America at the end of 2013, and nearly 12,500 in Europe. Steel pipes and tubes were one of the biggest profit drivers for the industry, which has been hammered by losses for five years running and posted a $1.7 billion deficit loss in 2013 before bouncing back with an operating profit of $140 million for the first nine months of 2014. Then, oil prices plummeted and things quickly got bad for the industry.

Even without the oil prices crash, the U.S. steel industry was facing pressure from cheap Asian imports. The competition forced the company to close two tube mills in Pennsylvania and Texas in August. It filed a steel-dumping complaint with the U.S. Department of Commerce in an attempt to limit the imports.

The notices sent to the plants in Houston, Texas and Lorain, Ohio were WARN Act notices, which are alerts mandated by the government that must be sent 60 days ahead of any large-scale firings.