The new contract includes a 9 percent wage increase over the next four years. Medical benefits, however, will cost steelworkers and retirees more in the future because the contract enables the company to freeze its insurance premiums in 2008.

USWA locals 4660 and 2705 at the Hibbing Taconite and United Taconite mines in Minnesota approved the contract by a 77 percent majority. The vote was much closer in Michigan, where members of USWA Local 4974 at the Tilden Mine rejected the contract in a 60-252 vote. Miners in Local 4950 at the Empire Mine—whose vote is counted along with the miners at the Tilden mine—approved the contract, resulting in only a 500-478 approval in Michigan’s Marquette Iron Range. Opposition to the contract centered on the mine operator’s drive to increase productivity while reducing the workforce. An estimated 175 miners at the Tilden mine of just over 300 will retire this year and no replacements are anticipated.

Tension was high on the Iron Range as the July 31 contract deadline approached. Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc. announced that they were training replacement workers at its non-union mine in Silver Bay. In mid-July, the company installed rows of trailers in its parking lot at the Hibbing Taconite mine. The housing trailers were declared uninhabitable by Hibbing city inspectors. It would have been the first time since 1907 that strikebreakers would be used during an Iron Range mining dispute.

Steelworkers at the Wabash mine in Newfoundland, Canada, also owned by Cleveland-Cliffs, went on strike July 5. USWA members at the Wabash pelletizing and shipping plant in Pointe Noire, Quebec, followed suit. Two weeks later, almost 1,000 workers at the Iron Ore Company of Canada in Newfoundland walked off the job, too. Solidarity rallies of up to 1,000 people have bolstered their confidence. Negotiations with the company were set to resume August 23, with the company continuing to ask for concessions from the Wabash miners.  
 
 
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