Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983

In the introduction to her first nonfiction book, Barbara Kingsolver writes "One of the most remarkable facts of the Phelps Dodge strike is that it was carried out mainly by women." That's  understatement in action. That fact is one of far too many in this story that are remarkable - and not in a good way.

Mining = Hard Work, Dirty Business

My roots run through coal country. I thought I knew mining. I was so naive.

Published in 1989, the introduction of Holding the Line offers a better overview of organized labor in modern US history than I learned in school. When the story really begins, it pokes some big holes in what we think we know about our society and fellow travelers.

Spoiler alert: strikers were beaten, arrested, harassed, and shot at. So were their families, including young kids. They stayed on strike, lived on nothing, and the company's profits went down - a little bit. The strike eventually ended (the unions were decertified) and world copper prices started to rise again.

There are a lot of ways to tell a story. In my opinion, Kingsolver did a pretty good job with this one, and regardless of your view of organized labor, I highly recommend the book.

Remember - this is nonfiction. It's a hard-to-believe, but true, story.

Company Towns Still Exist 

In 1983 Phelps Dodge ran the most productive copper mine in North America, in Morenci, Arizona. The mining operation, like the ones in Clifton and Ajo, were physically dangerous, discrimination was overt, and the house always won, in part because the houses were owned by Phelps Dodge.

The (only) local clinics were owned by Phelps Dodge. The police were paid by Phelps Dodge. It was a company town. That meant you got the medical care, protection, justice, food, water, education, and everything else that Phelps Dodge wanted you to have.

And what was it like to work there? I think the examples in my history books of dangerous working conditions and company towns were taken right out of The Jungle, written in 1906, but they could have been taken out of Arizona newspapers in the 1980s.

Unions and the Modern Reality of Discrimination 

If you're a middle-or-better-class white person who grew up in a middle-or-better-class (white) neighborhood in the past 50 or 60 years, you probably have a warm fuzzy feeling when you think about the American Dream.

Lucky you. Lucky me. Let's get a grip.

Living the American Dream was, and is, a dirty, damn hard job for people with dark skin who speak a dialect that doesn't necessarily sound like "American English."

Old habits die hard, they say. What they don't say is that some old habits don't die, they have to be killed - and it gets messy, folks. Organized labor has help some unhelpful old habits die. Before you let that upset your apple cart, please consider both sides of the story.

Well into the 1960s, Kingsolver writes, Anglo and Mexican American men still changed in separate facilities. The company housing for Mexican workers was inferior. The Mexican workers were citizens and employees as much as the Anglos. In Morenci, the Steelworkers Union took on the housing issue in 1967. They were joined by other unions, and some of them brought only whites to the committee meetings. Why? Kingsolver quotes a union rep who was there: "The UTU guys were all Anglos - P.D. didn't let Mexicans on the trains at that time."

To be clear, Phelps-Dodge Corporation was not the only company that actively practiced discrimination in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. I'm making another point, however. Why have I never been taught about the role unions have played in our legislative history? I wrote about employment law for a dozen years and never did I stumble across an article about how much our current "equal" opportunity society owes to unions?

This book, ostensibly about women's roles in the strike and how different individuals came to be union supporters, teaches much more than that.

Journalistic Perspective Remains Relevant Today

In the summer of 1983, Kingsolver was supplementing her day job as a scientific writer by angling for freelance assignments. 

A string of queries landed her a contract to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike for several news publications. The book grew out of that experience, and Kingsolver notes that she grew from the experience, too, both personally and professionally. The journalism profession can't compare to mining, but I'd argue that like mining, it is harder than most people think, and more important to our daily lives and the strength of this country than most of us want to realize. 

I want to emphasize that only a small portion of the introduction is about the writer. The story rightly belongs to the miners and it is focused on them. But the author's aside about journalism struck me as very relevant in 2019. 

While seven or seven hundred witnesses to an event can come away with seven or seven hundred stories, the "myth" of journalism is that all good reporters will come away with essentially the same story. Psychology says otherwise. 

"Journalists, like other mortals, must sift through the thousands of data points in their field of vision and decide which few among them really matter. That these decisions reflect our personalities is not deliberate malpractice, but a symptom of humanity."

One Little Chapter in Modern US History

I dog-eared a lot of pages of reading this one. Holding the Line is still available online, in many libraries, and it is well cited on JSTOR's primary sources site. I highly recommend it for anyone who reads, works, or lives in the 21st century. 

What has become of Phelps Dodge and the mining industry? That's another story, and it is still being written today. The Tucson, AZ visitors bureau encourages vacationers to tour a copper mine near there. I wonder what Anna Ochoa O'Leary would say about that.

Now an associate professor at Arizona University, during the strike, O'Leary was a student and one of the women who served as president of the Morenci Miner's Women's Auxiliary. O'Leary has also written a book that recalls the strike. I suspect she's still watching, very closely, as the stories there continue to unfold.