The vote came less than a week after workers at P&M's Kemmerer mine in Wyoming ratified a similar agreement.

At union headquarters in nearby Window Rock, Arizona, an all-day celebration was in progress. Miners and their families arrived throughout the day, mostly in pickup trucks. They voted inside the union hall and a lunch was served by the women's auxiliary while Navajo drummers played in a tent in the parking lot next to the canteen. More than 90 percent of the workers at the McKinley mine are Navajo.

At an open mike rally at strike headquarters, several people thanked the substantial number of miners and members of the women's auxiliary who had been on the picket line daily throughout the long strike.

"We're proud we were able to secure the same improvements as our brothers and sisters in Wyoming," said Lawrence Oliver, UMWA Local 1332 president. "More important, we were able to defeat a proposal that would have required us to give up our hard-won health care benefits and enter into the federal government's Indian Health Services [IHS] program."

Oliver was referring to a bribe that P&M proposed to Local 1332 members--that if the miners gave up their fully funded health care and used IHS, the company would pay each Navajo miner $100 a month.

Most of the miners Militant reporters talked with at the ratification vote agreed with Oliver. Beating back the company's attempt to place Navajo miners in IHS was seen as the biggest victory in the strike.

Local UMWA members were also happy about beating back the company on overtime pay. P&M's original proposal was that miners would get paid time and half only after a 40-hour week instead of an 8-hour day, eliminating time and a half for Saturdays and double time for Sundays.

Local 1332 was also able to push back P&M's attempt to implement an "alternative work schedule" that would have meant 10 to 12 hour workdays.

Oliver noted that in the last big strike, in 1987, one-third of the workforce had not participated. "I would like to thank all those new miners for striking with us," he said. "Your solidarity made us a whole lot stronger."

Phyllis Shanklin, speaking for the women's auxiliary, related that they had organized many fund-raising events throughout the strike, such as dances and music events, that provided lots of food and meals. She felt one of their most important successes was that they had raised $1,600 to pay utility bills for miners so their electricity and gas wouldn't get turned off.

John Wilson, a miner who has worked at McKinley for only three years, related how he had been part of a team that traveled to San Francisco at the end of July to meet with San Francisco labor officials to map out plans for a union rally at the headquarters of Chevron, P&M's parent company.

During the strike, Local 1332 members traveled to Los Angeles, where they won support from workers at Chevron's El Segundo refinery. Miners spoke before the New Mexico State AFL-CIO in Las Cruces and sent 40 members and supporters to a rally at P&M's corporate offices in Denver on July 26, where they were joined by a similar number of UMWA strikers from Kemmerer, Wyoming.

"Chevron did not like the image the Denver Post projected," Lawrence Oliver said, referring to the newspaper coverage of the Denver action, where workers drew attention to the company's anti-worker practices.

"The paper presented them as using discrimination and racial tactics. I'm sure that helped push their decision to renegotiate."

Local 1332 was planning a rally for August 13 that was to include miners from the Black Mesa and Kayenta mines, also on the Navajo Nation. Their contracts with Peabody Coal are to expire August 31. Because of the victory at McKinley, that action has been turned into a victory celebration.