Labor War in the Mojave

by: CA Berkeley WV

Tue Mar 23, 2010 at 08:00:00 AM EDT

In a surprising turn of events, four employees of British-Australian mining firm Rio Tinto pleaded guilty Monday to taking bribes during annual negotiations over iron ore prices in China, according to lawyers and an Australian diplomat.

I have described where I lived in California as halfway between Death Valley and Buck Owens. Bakersfield is the county seat of Kern County, California. The Pacific Gas and Electric litigation that Erin Brockovich brought due to contaminated water was in Hinkley, also in the Mojave Desert..

Another Union Miner Story

Terri Judd's labor owns part of this eerie landscape--or rather its void. She's a third-generation borax miner, as deeply rooted in the high desert as one of the native Joshua trees. Every working morning for the past thirteen years, she has bundled her long red hair under a hard hat, climbed up the ladder of a giant Le Tourneau wheel loader and turned on its 1,600-horsepower Detroit Diesel engine.

It is the largest open pit mine in California. The workers have been locked out since January 31. These are the people who got on the bus for Burros - Bobcats meets.

Generally, the population falls within the lower to middle socioeconomic group. Boron is a rural mining community and got its name from the boron compound known as borax, which is found in the area.

We were the burros, the pack animal of the old prospectors. They were the bobcat, masters of desert survival. We both had to watch out for coyotes.

1962: Switches to the Republican Party. Fearing loss of governmental contracts, General Electric drops "General Electric Theater" as Reagan's speeches increasingly take an anti-Big Government and anti-Kennedy administration tone. Official excuse from CBS is a ratings drop. Hosts the TV series "Death Valley Days," an anthology of Old West folklore sponsored by 20-Mule Team Borax.

Kern County still has active gold production within the California Desert. The children from Randsburg rode the bus about an hour to get to the high school in Ridgecrest. Those original quonset huts? The safest place for my junior high science classes.

Oil was discovered in the county in 1899 and over 80% of California's oilfields are in Kern County, accounting for 10% of the total oil production in the entire United States. The largest wind farms are in Tehachapi which is in the central part of the county, and one is slated for expansion.

Kern County is the home of the Giant Sequoias in the northeast. Winter rains bring spring wildflowers and the season is on the horizon there. We have 15,000 year old Indian petropgyphs. There are treatened species such as the desert tortoise. The person in charge of the recovery plan grew up in Ridgecrest, and received a PhD in population biology from The University of California, Berkeley.

The Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS), China Lake, encompasses 1.1 million acres of land, somewhere between size of Rhode Island and Delaware, in California's upper Mojave Desert. The Navy Base was about the only summer job available while I was in college. The test ranges there developed most of the air weapon systems used in our Asian conflicts. I have known the DOD civilian now in charge of these test ranges my entire life.

The first Japanese American Internment camp operated in the valley at Manzanar near Independence, California, in the county to the north. Ironically the development of Los Angeles as a major metropolitan area by 1941 that attracted immigrants would not have been possible without the California Water Wars.

The names of Harrison Otis Gray, editor of the newly founded Los Angeles Times, William Mulholland and Fred Eaton, former Los Angeles mayor, are woven in this story.

But the residents of the Owens Valley were not the only ones out-maneuvered by Mulholland and Eaton. Mulholland in particular had portrayed the acquisition of the Owens River as a life or death matter for Los Angeles. In reality, however, much of the water was to be used for irrigating the nearby San Fernando Valley, where a syndicate of private investors, many the personal friends of Mulholland and Eaton, had been furiously buying up land with the assurance that its value would skyrocket. This same group of investors was critical in securing passage of the 1905 bond issue that would pay for the Owens River diversion.
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As they watched employees of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power destroy the dams and locks of their irrigation system, the residents of Owens Valley decided to fight back. Early on the morning of May 21, 1924, dynamite destroyed the Los Angeles Aqueduct at a structurally critical point. The city sent out private investigators and offered a $10,000 reward, but no one in Owens Valley would turn in a neighbor for what many considered an act of self-defense. The sabotage continued for months, and Mulholland received hundreds of threatening letters, but his only comment was that he "half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley's orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there."

The farmers of Owens Valley, once know as The Switzerland of California, were the losers. The 1974 movie Chinatown was inspired by these historical facts. This was the last movie Roman Polanski filmed in the U.S.

And the desert has its own labor wars.

Terri acknowledges that her devotion to the mine has been an act of unrequited love. In last year's contract negotiations, Rio Tinto (the British-Australian multinational acquired its Boron facility, U.S. Borax, in 1968 and renamed it Rio Tinto Borax) stunned members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, ILWU, Local 30 (Boron), by demanding abolition of the contractually enshrined seniority system and the surrender of any worker voice in the labor process.

In the name of "flexibility" the company wanted the old contract gone. Cuts in holiday and other leave, conversion to part-time positions, involuntary overtime, and a promise to be exempt from the law. The company wants to a free hand if workers file grievances against the company with the National Labor Relations Board. The union unanimously rejected the new contract. And guess what the company's next move was?

The Gettier mercenaries wore sneers and dark glasses as they pushed their convoy past a crowd of angry Local 30 members. "Being locked out," says Terri, "is different from going on strike. Initially there's disbelief that the company is actually serious about booting you out the door. Hey, my granddad worked in this mine. But then you see that caravan of scabs coming to take your jobs, and the betrayal cuts like a knife in your heart."

Terri's grandfather lived in a company town and owed his soul to the company store. He was part of the great migration west that Steinbeck chronicled in the Grapes of Wrath. This is not the hollows of West Virginia, this is the very outer burbs of Los Angeles. Just like where I grew up in the Mojave Desert, there are limited employment opportunities. During the 1974 strike some miners found work at the test range in China Lake.

During the 1974 conflict Boron polarized into majority pro-union and minority pro-company factions. There was a famous riot at the front gate in the first hours of the conflict, followed by the dynamiting of several foremen's homes, the blowing up of the mine's power line, episodic exchanges of gunfire, an exodus of managerial employees and de facto martial law during the nearly yearlong occupation of the community by Kern County sheriffs.

Sounds a little familiar? This time the town supports the miners, not because of the union, but the scabs and the effect it is staring to have on the town's economy. Even the sheriff's deputies enforcing the lockout, in contract negations with the county, are friendly. And don't forget the ripple effects of the mortgage industry and housing price crash.

"Normally the VFW is packed to the rafters on Friday nights for karaoke," Terri explains, "but last Friday there were just three families. Business at Domingo's [a Mexican restaurant made famous by its popularity among Space Shuttle crews from nearby Edwards] is way down, and the town dentist could close because everyone has lost their family dental benefits."

Kevin adds that many Local 30 families, especially those who recently bought homes in now-sunk boom-burbs like Victorville and Palmdale, forty or so miles from Boron, face imminent disaster. "Their mortgages are already below periscope depth, so the lockout is just the final shove out the front door. They'll lose their homes."

Rio Tinto has a reputation around the world. Last summer the US district court in Los Angeles upheld the standing of Bougainville residents to sue Rio Tinto in an American court for "crimes against humanity, war crimes, and racial discrimination." The Government of Norway divested itself from Rio Tinto shares and banned further investment due to environmental concerns. Both the government-controlled Aluminum Corporation of China and Australian BHP Billiton attempted a hostile takeover in 2007. Rio Tinto itself had merged with Alcan and the debt put pressure on its cash flow.

Rio Tinto managed to survive the first year of recession by cutting thousands of jobs and selling off $10 billion of nonessential assets while retrenching in its core mission of exploiting "large, low-cost ore bodies." Mine managers in its minerals division, which includes borates, were told that future investment in their operations would only reward dramatic cost-cutting and higher earnings, not status quo profits. Labor, it seems, is an especially "compressible" cost.

In the specific case of Boron, the financing of a project called "the Modified Direct Dissolving of Kernite," advertised as the key to the mine's long-term profitability, was made conditional upon achieving "flexibility and accountability in our work practices"--that is to say, scrapping the old collective bargaining agreement with Local 30.

Rio does have now have joint-production venture with BHP Billiton which prompted the Chinese to arrest four executives, eventually charging them with bribery. In another move to raise cash, Arch Coal Inc., the second-biggest U.S. coal producer, agreed to buy their Jacob Ranch mine in Wyoming for $761 million.

This desert mining town is in the middle of global politics and international trade. The miners are represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Support has come from up and down the West Coast. The docks are run safely and the workers are well paid. In February it held its international conference in nearby Palmdale as a sign of support. It still operates under the principle of "An injury to one is an injury to all."

Toni McCormick, a pretty, jovial woman in her late 20s, gives me a ride back to my car. The wife of a Local 30 member, she coaches the cheer squad at Boron High. "I'm fourth generation," she tells me. "My great-grandfather's house is still standing, made out of old dynamite boxes held together with chicken wire. Our football team plays in a high desert league with other mining and military towns. Sometimes they have to tackle each other in the dirt because grass won't grow in a saline lake bed."

I live in the non-mining part of West Virginia now, but what I read about the southern coalfields sounds a lot like home. Don't write me off because of the funny name. Some of the players are the same. The people everywhere deserve better for their blood, sweat and tears.