Battle in the Mojave: Lessons from the Rio Tinto Lockout

Craig Merrilees

Procession to the gates of the Rio Tinto mine, March 2010.

It has been a difficult two years for the labor movement in the United States. The Obama election held out the promise of labor law reform and massive new organizing initiatives. Instead, there was no Employee Free Choice Act and the biggest organizing campaign in 2010 involved an internal dispute between the Service Employees International Union and the newly formed National Union of Healthcare Workers. In the absence of reform, and with our unions totally on the defensive, labor strategists and organizers are searching for a plan to move forward. The story of the ILWU’s battle against a lockout in the Mojave Desert a year ago is a contribution toward understanding the moment and the features of a labor counterattack.

The massive right-wing drumbeat—scapegoating public sector employees and demanding deep concessions—is a tune all too familiar to private sector workers. Some recent struggles are illustrative. A UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers Union) strike at a Shaw’s supermarket warehouse in Methuen, Massachusetts lasted for four months in 2010 after the employer attempted to impose a concessionary contract. The Mott’s strike in upstate New York a year ago lasted for almost four months after this highly profitable subsidiary of Dr Pepper/Snapple demanded harsh concessions, asserting that there was no need to pay higher wages in a depressed labor market. The Honeywell lockout of the Steelworkers in Metropolis, Illinois began on June 28, 2010 and continues to this day. The list goes on and on, day after day, and all these conflicts share one common feature: corporations that are on the attack against workers’ hard-won wages and benefits in longtime unionized workplaces. Our capacity to resist these concessionary demands, and to effectively conduct strikes and lockouts, is crucial to weathering this period of attacks and going on the offensive.

The ILWU Under Attack

Last year the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) confronted such an attack in Boron, California at the Rio Tinto Corporation’s borax mining facility—the largest borate mine in the world. The mine is located 130 miles from downtown Los Angeles, in the Mojave Desert. Boron’s Kern County community is a desolate, hardscrabble area where temperatures routinely exceed 125 degrees in the summer. Four hundred and fifty ILWU Local 30 members work at the mine. Last January, they were locked out of their jobs for 105 days. The mine is in the congressional district of Kevin McCarthy, an archconservative and now the Republican majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives. The majority of these ILWU members are Caucasian males with strong religious affiliations. Several of the worker-leaders are lay preachers, and many are Mormons.

Rio Tinto—which has been likened to the villainous mining company in the hit movie Avatar (which mines “unobtainium” on the planet Pandora)—is the world’s third-largest mining conglomerate, operating on six continents. The company’s origins go back to nineteenth-century Seville, Spain where the copper-mining process produced a rio tinto—a “tainted river.” The company evolved, through mergers and acquisitions, into a British-owned behemoth with headquarters in London and Melbourne. The Boron facility mines borates which are used in a wide variety of consumer products, including food stuffs and television screens! Twenty Mule Team Borax is a laundry additive and the advertising sponsor of Death Valley Days, which had been hosted by Ronald Reagan before he went into politics.

The ILWU’s history with the Boron miners dates back to the 1960s, when the company was still independently owned by U.S. Borax. Then, the miners were represented by the International Chemical Workers Union. In 1964, they decided to change their affiliation and join the ILWU. Rio Tinto acquired the U.S. Borax facility in 1967. In 1974, there was a six-month strike at the mine, which was violently suppressed by the company and the Kern County sheriffs. The level of violence was such...