Labor Strikes in the US - Essay Example

Copper Crucible – Labor Relations On June 30, 1983 nearly 2,400 copper mine, mill, and smelter workers had gone on strike against Phelps Dodge Corp., then the second largest producer of copper in the US, protesting cuts in wages, vacation time, and medical benefits. Copper prices were bad. Copper mining was suffering from low-priced foreign competition and the effects of a global recession which began at the onset of the 80s. The volatility of the copper market was affected by copper from Third World countries which were selling theirs below cost in order to pay growing debts while US monetary policy had pumped up the dollar making American copper more expensive on the foreign market because it was traded on world exchanges where dollar was the medium. In response to the crisis and to stem further deepening of the recession, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker slowed the rate of growth of the money supply (making money scarce created a large demand for it) and raised interest rates (which would naturally occur when money supply diminishes). The federal funds rate, which was about 11% in 1979, rose to 20% by June 1981. The prime interest rate, a highly important economic measure, eventually reached 21.5% in June 1982 (“Early 1980s Recession”). Of course, its effect on businesses was disastrous. Businesses thrive on loans and the situation raised production costs, among others. From a cursory glance of this conflict, this was a typical fight between the unionized Phelps Dodge miners representing labor and its socialist ideology and Phelps Dodge, its capitalist employer. The miners were largely made up of Mexican immigrants who had settled in four remote company towns in Arizona: Morenci, Douglas, Ajo, and Bisbee; and El Paso, Texas under the company’s good graces. The company, a giant transnational monopoly, reacted to the recession by demanding across-the-board concessions. These included cuts in wages and benefits, an end to cost-of-living adjustments, and a two-tier system with lower wages and benefits for new workers (Workers World, "Phelps Dodge”). This provoked the United Steelworkers and a number of other unions at its copper mines in Morenci, Ajo, and other towns in Arizona, as well as in Texas, into a strike. To settle their differences, the union initially agreed to a three - year wage freeze and retention of the cost of living adjustment clause. The clause provided that cost-of-living increase be tied to the consumer price-index – a demand accepted by other industry giants like Kennecott, Asarco, Inspiration Consolidated Copper and Magma Copper (Bandzak, 1105). The company however, junked pattern bargaining, a strategy in resolving labor conflict that the union had developed and established back in 1967 in the rest of the industry. To push its agenda in the course of negotiating a new agreement, the trade union gains a new and superior entitlement from one employer, and then uses that agreement as a precedent to demand the same entitlement from other employers. Pioneered by unions such as the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters it involved the identification of a target employer that is most likely to agree to a favorable employment contract. For the selected company, it provided for an opportunity to set an employer’s precedence for the industry. There was however, the risk of a labor disruption if negotiations failed. Once this contract had been successfully negotiated and ratified, the union declared it a "pattern agreement" and presented it to the other employers as a “take-it-or-leave-it offer” (“Pattern Bargaining”). Pattern bargaining, at that time, was the crowning glory of union solidarity. It originated from the AFL-CIO sponsored all-unions unity conference in 1966 in Chicago where it felt that companies of similar size producing similar products should be pressed into similar contracts. The strategy brought about the “Heaven in 67” round of wage and benefits for the unionized workers (Rosenblum, “Copper Crucible” 38). Between 1976 and 1983, the union’s success in the copper towns had also brought a new sense of social dignity for many of Phelps Dodge workers, but over those years they also lost their innocence. The union "community" had grown from locals fighting in relative isolation to a sophisticated and complex bargaining network. The International Steelworkers and the local union members never fully communicated to each other about how union life had transformed them and their families from being economically undervalued, racially abused, and politically ignored enough as to have fully taken notice of the costs of that transformation (Rosenblum 218). On April 7, 1982, Phelps Dodge as a result of the recession, announced it would lay off 3,400 of its workers in Texas and Arizona. One year later, in May, 1983, the company began negotiations with the United Steelworkers and other unions in Phoenix, Arizona. The subsequent negotiations with the unions failed to lead to an agreement and on midnight of July 30, 1983, a strike began. Six weeks into the strike, the company advertised for scabs in the newspapers. This infuriated the workers. On August 8, 1983 1,000 strikers, family members and supporters massed at the gates of the Morenci mine and other mining towns with pipes, bats, and chains to stop the scabs. The company canceled production for 24 hours and the Democratic governor of Arizona, Bruce Babbitt immediately flew in to mediate the conflict. Phelps Dodge agreed to a ten-day moratorium on hiring (Fein). Unsatisfied, the workers mobilized the next day demanding a complete shutdown by noon. The company was shut down before noon and Phelps Dodge turned to government for intervention. After the moratorium expired, on the morning of August 19, Governor Babbitt sent in Huey helicopters, tanks, 426 state troopers, and 325 National Guard members. Other military vehicles arrived in Clifton and Morenci as part of "Operation Copper Nugget" to break the strike to protect the scabs (“Arizona Copper Mine Strike”). Strikers at the gate were unable to prevent the replacement workers from entering the mine. Eight days later, 10 strikers were arrested in Ajo and charged with rioting. From this point on, the strike lost much of its momentum. The company evicted the miners from company-owned housing, barred them from company-owned hospitals, wore the workers down, and broke the union. It set a precedent for attacks on mineworkers throughout the region. Later in 1995, after over a decade, Jonathan D. Rosenblum, author of Copper Crucible, published a report revealing facts of the state of Arizona’s deployment of agents of the Arizona State Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency (ACISA) monitoring and bugging the meetings of the union and filing the information on hundreds of union members into a supercomputer in Tucson and sharing them with plant managers and security officers at Phelps Dodge (Rosenblum, “Union Busting”). The strike finally and officially ended on February 19, 1986 when the National Labor Relations Board rejected appeals from the unions attempting to halt decertification. When the dust had finally settled, Phelps Dodge had wiped out thirty union locals made up of more than two thousand workers. Its antiunion stand destroyed the entire bargaining structure in the copper industry (Rosenblum, “Copper Crucible” 10). The conflict also ended in the decertification of all the thirteen unions involved, strikers losing everything including their jobs, their union, their homes and their community, where three generations of miners had toiled for Phelps Dodge Copper (Bandzak, 1105). Works Cited “Arizona Copper Mine Strike.” Wikipedia.org. Posted: September 8, 2006. Web. Date accessed: February 25, 2011. Bandzak, Ruth A. "A Productive Systems Analysis of the 1983 Phelps Dodge Strike." Journal of Economic Issues 25.4 ( December 1991): 1105. Print. “Early 1980s Recession.” Wikipedia. org. Posted: January 30, 2010. Web. Date accessed: February 21, 2010. Fein, Dan. "The Militant: Book On 1983 Copper Strike Draws Wrong Lessons.” Themilitant.com. Posted: August 21, 1995. Web. Date accessed: February 22, 2011. “Pattern bargaining.” Wikipedia.org. Posted: February 4, 2008. Web. Date accessed: February 23, 2011. Rosenblum, Jonathan D. Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America. Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1995. Print. Rosenblum, Jonathan D. “Tucson Weekly: Union Busting - How Arizona’s ‘CIA’ Helped Phelps – Dodge Destroy the Unions.” Tucsonweekly.com. Posted: June 29 – July 5, 1995. Web. Date accessed: February 22, 2011. "Workers World: Phelps Dodge Copper Miners to Pittston Coal Strike." Workers.org. Posted: July 5, 2010. Web. Date accessed: February 22, 2011. Read More