Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America

The 1981 firing and replacing of striking air traffic controllers by President Ronald Reagan is considered the start of labor's current decline. Legal protection of employees' right to join unions is now often ineffective and the strike, once labor's most potent weapon, has been defanged by employers who use permanent replacements for striking workers. In his first book, lawyer and journalist Rosenblum argues convincingly that the crucial struggle over permanent replacements came not with PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) but in the lesser-known 1983-1986 strike by the United Steelworkers of America against the Phelps Dodge copper company in Arizona and Texas. There, the company moved quickly to hire replacements. Over a year later, after picket-line violence (including a National Guard call-up by Governor Bruce Babbitt), much human tragedy, religious, racial and ethnic divisions among Phelps Dodge workers, an abortive union-sponsored corporate campaign and a lingering recession, replacement workers were legally allowed to vote the union out. And, with help from Phelps Dodge and an employer-friendly federal labor official, they did. Rosenblum chronicles this story with compassion and considerable objectivity. He portrays the strikers sympathetically but not uncritically, and his portrait of Phelps Dodge details the cooly self-interested executive decision-making processes, devoid of compassion for the employees. (Jan.)