How it was in 1983
Holding the Line
Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike
By Barbara Kingsolver (1989)
Re-published by Faber 2024
My programme of unlearning leads me this week to discuss Barbara Kingsolver’s newly republished account of the Phelps Dodge strike of 1983.
I’d been in metals four years at the time, and the big beasts of the copper landscape were just coming into focus. In the US, Phelps Dodge, founded in 1834, was copper aristocracy. Others included Kennecott, Cyprus, Magma, and Anaconda.
Published in 1989 two years after the end of this four-year strike, Kingsolver’s book is based on the struggle between Phelps Dodge and its Morenci mine workers in Arizona. (A mine still giving today, and now owned by Freeport-McMoran).
Strikes in the copper industry were just a normal part of the business cycle - a planned ritual at contract-negotiation time, followed by a stand-off during which necessary maintenance took place, after which matters were finally resolved via new contracts and face-saving exercises on all sides.
But in 1983 Phelps Dodge decided it didn’t want to play that game anymore. The company decided to break ranks with their competitors who settled, and instead sought to use prevailing low copper prices to cut wages, fire and rehire, and decertify the union.
PD didn’t quite bring in the Pinkertons (as Carnegie/Frick had done during the Homestead steel strike in 1892) but their corporate influence was such that state forces simply took their side; the Governor sent in the The National Guard and officers of the Department of Public Safety (who were anything but), as well as local Sheriffs, in a manner that smacked of the heavy handed state tactics being used in Russia and Poland at the time.
I admit the significance of the Arizona strike completely passed me by. To me at my broking desk opposite Billingsgate Fish Market in the City of London, with LME prices uploaded in black marker-pen onto a whiteboard through the day, a strike was just another factor to be passed back to customers along with the live copper prices from the ring. A labour dispute in a far-off country was no more than an improvement on weeks of stagnation and sitting around trying to invent a crisis. The human cost did not figure.
Forty years later, it’s hard not to be impressed by Barbara Kingsolver’s nose for a less than popular story. Based on 75 face-to-face interviews with participants, she put down a piece of journalism that now stands the test of time and takes us back to a turning point in industrial relations.
The significance of the strike and its length and tenacity is because almost all the picketers were women (their husbands were either locked up, sacked, or so threatened that they were powerless). They called themselves the Morenci Miners Women’s Auxiliary.
Looking back, I’d understood the broad-brush strokes of copper economics – that the US was losing ground, becoming uncompetitive, with mining moving south to Chile, Peru and Mexico. The country that in the 1970s had produced about 2 mln tons of copper a year produces only a fifth of Chile's 5 mln tons now.
With copper in Feb 1981 at no more than $1.40 per lb - and by December 75 cts per lb - it is impossible not to have some sympathy with PD. Not even the strongest copper miner could continue to sustain itself at those numbers. But PD's decisions were cruel, obstinate, vindictive, violent, and foolish – especially to their female workers.
‘Doll became pregnant. When her foreman found out, he tried once again to make her give up, this time by sending her to the service yard to do work that involved constant squatting and heavy lifting..’
The bottom line is that Phelps had seen the circumstances as a commercial opportunity to break the union and so be liberated from the lead weights of their competitors.
Looking back now, the stories as recounted in the women’s own words bear a striking resemblance to the way in which demonstrations against cruise missiles deployed at Greenham Common changed many men’s perception of women at that time. Like the Greenham protests which lasted 19 years from 1981 to 2000, the PD strike altered the way women were treated in both home and community – and sometimes it wasn’t pretty. This is Doll again fighting to get respect..
‘I had to use the men’s bathroom of course. I would kick the door and say, ‘Whoever’s in there, get out, because I gotta go!’ One day one of the head guys was in there, and when he came out what a look he gave me! Right after that they gave me my own bathroom’.
Women had to bust those doors down on the bigger issues too and would never again be told to leave political battles merely to the men folk. Unlike Greenham where men were physically bundled off site, the Arizona wives and mothers, led their men folk (who might have settled for lower wages) to stick out for the cause and show that if they had the stomach for the fight the husbands better have also. This in some cases led to divorce.
There were cultural issues too. More than 50% of the workers at PD were Mexicans who were treated in an apartheid manner by their ‘Anglo’ bosses. It wasn’t surprising that so many of the miners were Latinos as the mines were in a part of North America which had once been Mexico. In their Catholic society the woman’s place was in the home. So, when the women decided to marshal a picket line and jeer the scab workers being literally helicoptered in by the company on lower wages than the sacked miners, some husbands considered the women had brought shame on their family. And yet Kingsolver’s interviews show that some of these same women had already been toughened up by proving to the company (in the time before the strike) that against all the odds they could do any job in the mine the men could do – and often better. Unappreciated as they were and treated with extreme chauvinism even by their own unions, these women took on a battle that had as much significance for the future of the mining industry as the battle for women’s suffrage in the UK had to the vote. Women who had never said boo to a goose, and been chained to the kitchen sink, suddenly found they were speaking before thousands in union halls all round America as they sought funding and support.
Ultimately by 1987 the battle to prevent decertification of the union was lost and the strike was effectively over. But a different battle had been won – at least in the USA. No more would it be possible for mining corporations to operate without the extraordinary high levels of safety and workplace security and male/female equality that we see as a norm today.
Much of this is a huge debt to the women who held out during the Arizona mine strikes.
By Anthony Lipmann
Published on www.lord-copper.com
12th November 2024