Vol. 81/No. 13 April 3, 2017
Idaho silver miners strike over bosses’ demands for deep cuts
AND EDWIN FRUIT
“I’ve invested a lifetime here,” said Noble, who has worked at the mine for 41 years. “I’ve never seen anything like what they are trying to do to us now. It’s a harsh environment down there. The miners are very productive. Everybody is on board with this.”
The company hasn’t budged since talks began prior to the contract’s expiration in May 2016. After union members rejected Hecla’s “last, best final offer” 222-0, the company announced it would impose portions of the new contract unilaterally on March 13. Workers went on strike the same day.
“Our last, best and final offer provides competitive benefits,” Phillips Baker Jr., Hecla’s president and CEO, said in a news release, “but also provides the flexibility necessary to operate the mine successfully in a changing economic and regulatory environment.”
“We’re not asking for anything new. We just want the same contract we have now,” miner Ron Sullivan said at a picket tent. “What the company pulled has brought the union together. All of our votes have been unanimous. They definitely made us a stronger union.”
“They made us mad by dragging this out for 10 months,” said Gian Ghigleri, who also works at the mine.
“The company is asking us to give up hard won benefits that took generations to acquire,” local union President Phil Epler wrote on the local’s Facebook page. “If we choose to work under their offer we may never see what we lost again.”
Hecla wants to change the way the job bidding system, schedules and vacations are allocated, Epler told us. The bosses want to change long-established staffing norms that miners said would cut wages and hurt safety.
“Recall rights used to be for three years after a layoff. The company wants to change it to three months,” said Epler. In recent years there have been production shutdowns, mostly due to equipment problems, that lasted about three months. This gives the bosses the ability to target certain workers and fire them.
“They also want the right to change insurance premiums and deductibles based on company profitability any time they want to,” he said.
Some 150 miners and their supporters held a fundraising spaghetti dinner at the Sunshine Inn restaurant in Kellogg, down the valley from Mullan, March 17. Twelve members of Machinists Local 86 from Spokane, Washington, attended, pledging to return the following weekend to bolster the picket line.
“I support this strike because someone has to fight the greed of the bosses,” said Kevin Winans, a worker at Triumph Composite Systems. “If not now, when?”
Machinists in Local 86 struck Triumph in Spokane in May 2016 when the bosses tried to impose a takeaway contract that included a deeper two-tier wage system, higher health care costs and no pensions for newer workers.
Over $2,000 was raised for the miners’ union hardship fund. Donations have also come from the Ironworkers union. The Mexican mine workers union sent a message of solidarity.
“Our contract comes up in June and both the company and union members are looking to see how the outcome at Lucky Eagle will affect us,” Perry Buddenberg, a union member at the Galena mine, told us when we met him going door to door discussing politics and showing workers the Militant.
Messages and donations can be sent to USW Local 5114, P.O. Box 427, Mullan, Idaho 83846. More information can be found at the local’s Facebook page.
Related articles:
On the Picket Line
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