Striking hard rock veins. Multinational Corporations and Miners’ Unions in Mexico and the United States, 1906-1952

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes simultaneous strikes during the first half of the 20th century in North America. The transformation of production in copper, lead, zinc, and silver mining districts determined the formation of a working class that operated between Mexico and the United States. Therefore, the labor conflicts combined market circumstances and management-imposed homologation of work structures across firm divisions with the international coordination of miners. The paper describes the emergence, growth, and demise of a regional industrial system.

KEYWORDS:

• Labor history
• strikes
• Mexico
• United States
• mining
• 20^th century

Acknowledgments

I thank Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato, Ted Beatty and Susie Porter for the guidance these years.

Disclosure statement

A previous version of this paper was presented in the EBHA Conference in 2016.

Notes

1. The debate between terms, as transnational, global, glocal, multinational, etc., will be avoided. In this paper transnational and global will mean simply across/beyond the nation-state, including relationships across the borders from local and national corporations and unions. See Dunning and Lundan (2008).

2. In 1916 the WFM changed its name to the International Union of Mine Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMSSW). It later reintegrated into the American Labor Federation (AFL), becoming, along with the United Mine Workers Association (UMWA), one of the few industrial unions in the federation. In the founding convention, held in Denver, the miners of the United States Mine of the U.S. Company in Bingham formed the Local #2.

3. That is the reason why the UMM from the railway industry was the first one to propose a collective negotiation since the purchase of the company. It was a mutual-aid society formed in 1900 on the workshops of the National Mexican Railway that – after the Mexican Revolution – strengthened their relations with the mine’s mechanics nationally.

4. The company, who employed at one time over 80% of the inhabitants in the town, kidnapped the delegate of the International Mine and Mill Union, W.M. Rasmussen, and putted him in prison. Rasmussen got out in late November and he had to wait for another season to organize the workers of interior Alaska.

5. The locals form Alaska were particularly hard to keep for the union. The massive dimensions of the territory made communications between the company workers very difficult, as the miners of a single firm could be as 60 miles away from each other. The companies usually not only controlled the town but also the roads and telegraphs, and the workers migrated only in the spring season. Only around 80 of the 750 workers needed by the Fairbanks Exploration Company had jobs all year, the rest being employed only between March and November. Year after year, locals’ representative had to maintain a campaign with the new arrivals, and they competed with the Independent Building Trades Union form the AFL. Moreover, life expenses of the delegates were extremely high, as much as 220% the higher than in Chicago, and they had to travel constantly. The delegate from Fairbanks had to organize the mines in Jonesville, over 300 miles away, the gold mines of Kimshan Cove, an island 800 miles into the Pacific, and the dredges in Dawson City, 400 miles into the Yukon in Canada. Most of the delegates were not prepared for the bulk of responsibilities in the territory, the hard work in the dredging season, the hard weather and the political prosecution. The concentration of the activities made the organizers an easy target for retributions, especially in the increasing militarization of the territory for the war. Most of the organizers had to spend some time in jail and one of them, Schulz, was imprisoned in a concentration camp for being German, despite his very known communist background. All of this implied a particularly high activist turnover and constant financial disagreements between the national leadership and the agents in Alaska.

6. The union was organizing similar strikes in Montana, Colorado and Alaska, which resolved as the Utah strike unfolded.

7. This time, the union could entirely stop the operations of the companies, having the complete unionized workers in the U.S. Company and Anaconda and vital workers in Utah Copper. This strength and the normalization of strikes during the New Deal Era permitted the IUMMSW and the US Company to agree on the employment of unionized workers for winches and pumps in Lark and US mines, although the company kept their watchmen for the duration of the stoppage. On the part of the company, centralization allowed them to operate a single smelter, and they had developed the capacity to turn it off at a relatively low cost. These developments allowed the company to respond to market variations.

8. In one of the letters of Clark with the ANMA, the delegate to the Conferencia Interamericana de Mineros, Metalúrgicos y Mecánicos de 1953 reported that ‘The Union is still officially controlled by the government appointed officials. It is true that some of the executive committee are not completely bastards’ (IUMMSW-UCB, box 264, file 16).

9. Years later, Matusow wrote False Witness, an account of the different lies he declared under oath, financed by the HUAC. Matusow (1955).

Additional information

Funding

I received funding for this project from the Fulbright Association Fellowship, the University of Notre Dame.

Notes on contributors

Israel García Solares

Israel García Solares, Born and raised in Xochimilco, Mexico. Manual worker for 10 years, intellectual worker since after.