AGE: 44
OCCUPATION: Borax miner
BIRTHPLACE: Heidelberg, Germany
INTERVIEWED IN: Boron, California
Born to a military family, Terri Judd lived on five different bases before she turned ten and her family moved back to the small town of Boron, California, where her father had grown up. A single mom and Desert Storm veteran, Terri followed her father and grandfather’s footsteps when she went to work at the borax mine that gave the town its name, a mine owned by international conglomerate Rio Tinto since 1970. Borax is a natural compound of sodium and the element boron, and it is an ingredient in a wide range of industrial and commercial products, from cosmetics to pesticides. The mine near Boron is the largest borax mine in the world.
When we first talk to Terri, she beams as she describes her work operating enormous quarry vehicles. “It’s something not a lot of people get to do,” she tells us. “It’s almost like I’m a little kid. I get big dump trucks and I get to go play in the dirt.” Then, after Rio Tinto locked the workers out in early 2010 during a contract dispute, Judd became one of the workers’ most visible spokespeople—though she never imagined she’d be standing up and talking in front of hundreds of people. “That’s not something I wanted to do,” she says. Asked why she did, she replies, “Because the union asked me to. They came out and said, ‘We need somebody to do this,’ and I had to step up to the plate. We’re fighting for our rights and need people to go out there, so I figured, why not?”
We first meet Terri Judd after the world premiere of the documentary Locked Out 2010, held at Boron High School on October 30, 2010.1 Cheerful conversation and the smell of popcorn from an old-fashioned machine float through the huge multipurpose room as workers and their families gather their things to leave, buoyed by seeing their story on the big screen.
MOVING TO BORON WAS A LITTLE BIT OF A CULTURE SHOCK
For the first ten years of my life, my father was in the U.S. Army, so my family traveled quite a bit. We lived on military bases in Pirmasens and Heidelberg in Germany; in Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Carson, Colorado; and Fort Polk, Louisiana. I think I’d actually been to four different schools by the fifth grade. You learn to make friends fast—there’s no such thing as being really shy.
In 1980, my father retired after twenty-six years in the army, and he, my mother, my sister, and I came back to Boron, California.2 He pretty much had a job waiting with U.S. Borax.3
Moving to Boron was a little bit of a culture shock. A lot of military bases are the size of a small city, and the majority of them are sitting next to a large city. Then we came to Boron, where we have between two and three thousand people, at the most, and you gotta drive fifty miles just to go to the movies. And Boron is very tight-knit. The first question you’re asked here is, “Who are your parents?”
I was lucky enough that I had grandparents who had lived here. My father had grown up in this area, and my mother had spent time here after she married my dad. So actually, we were known to the community. We weren’t coming in as strangers.
You got people here who are friends who go back. They’re friends because their parents and their grandparents were friends. Then we got families that are mortal enemies. Sometimes it can get pretty ridiculous. I know of two individuals, and I won’t name names, but these women have probably not spoken in forty years. Nobody really knows what happened. But these two, they just don’t speak, they don’t even look at each other.
And we know who’s alone. We know who has family that comes and checks on them. If people live by themselves, don’t have many visitors, neighbors make a point of keeping an eye out for ’em.
In Boron I had cousins who lived three houses down from me. We weren’t indoors a lot. We would ride dirt bikes, three-wheels, ATVs. We had an entire desert to explore. If we weren’t in school, if it was summertime, we were outside playing, chasing jackrabbits, little bitty lizards—the big ones tend to hide from you very well. And then of course you have horny toads out there—they got horns growing out of their little heads.
I will say, I was the tomboy. And I was daddy’s little girl. I loved following my father around. He had this firm belief that if you’re going to drive a car, you should know how it operates. When I was a teenager he used to love dragging me out of bed Saturday mornings, saying, “Come out here, I want to show you this one thing on the car.” I remember looking at an engine one morning, being half asleep, and saying, “What are you doing to me, Dad?” If he had a project he wanted to do, he’d always come and say, “Come and help me.” If the washing machine broke down, Dad would want to take it apart and see if he could fix it, and I remember being the one to hold the flashlight and hand him the tools.
I graduated from high school in 1988, and I worked as a security guard out at Borax for most of two years. Then I left that job and spent four years in the military. You could pretty much say I followed in my father’s footsteps.
I had just turned twenty years old when I was sent to Iraq. I had been in the United States Army for only four months. I’d enlisted in April 1990 and I’d just completed my basic and my advanced individual training. My specialty was going to be the OH-58 Delta helicopter; I was going to be a crew chief on that.
I went to my new post at Fort Stewart, in Georgia, on September 1, 1990, which I believe was around Labor Day. And only three days later, I got stuck on a plane and sent to catch the rest of my unit, who had already been deployed over in Saudi Arabia for the start of Operation Desert Shield. I ended up joining them in the desert, because I hadn’t graduated from my training till August 17 or 18, and Saddam Hussein had already invaded Kuwait on August 2.
It was a waiting game, the first eight months we were over there. We stayed in Saudi Arabia during that time. It wasn’t until the ground war started that we jumped positions to Iraq.
We advanced straight up to a section of the Euphrates River and set up camp literally out in the middle of nowhere. I thought Boron was the middle of nowhere, but I discovered that nope, there’s someplace even worse. By the time we showed up, the war was over and peace had been declared. So we saw the Iraqi soldiers, but most of them had pretty much given up, and the U.S. was like, “We can’t take any more prisoners,” so they were just sending them home. So it was the opportunity to, quote, “be in a war” without ever firing a shot. Which I’m actually pretty happy about.
I was over there in Iraq for just about nine months, and then I went back to my regular duty station. I got out towards the end of 1993, beginning of ’94.
I was supposed to be in for six years, but I stayed in for only four. I took an early out because when I got orders to deploy to Korea, I was already pregnant with my daughter Ashley. My orders were put on hold when Ashley was born in June ’93, but when my daughter turned six months old I would’ve had to go to Korea for one year and leave her with my parents. There was no way I was going to leave my six-month-old and be gone for a year. You miss all that important stuff. Her dad was in the military too, but by the time she was born it was a disaster of a relationship.
I ended up getting hired back on with the guard service out there at Borax, and I worked for them while I put in applications—applications to work at the mine, applications with the California Highway Patrol—if they took an application, I put in for it. Finally in July 1997 I got hired on with Borax as a mineworker.
I GET TO GO PLAY IN THE DIRT
I went in as a laborer and spent about three weeks in the labor pool. It was a requirement. When you got hired in, you went into the labor pool, and that’s where you learned the different parts of the plant. From there, you put in bids to go to certain departments. I knew exactly where I wanted to go.
As soon as they put up the bid for the mine department, I put my name in on it. Same as my father, same as my grandfather. I wanted to go play with the big trucks.
I love my job. It’s something not a lot of people get to do. It’s almost like I’m a little kid. I get big dump trucks and I get to go play in the dirt. It’s like overgrown Tonka toys. I’ve run haul trucks, water trucks, dozers, shovels, and front-end loaders. A front-end loader is a big bucket that sits on four wheels.
My job is to load the ore into the haul trucks and send it up to the crusher, after they strip off the waste material, drill, and blast the ore. I scoop it up into the bucket, go up to the side of the truck, dump it into the dump truck, and that’s all I do all day long: load them dump trucks. And then they haul it from the bottom of the open pit up to the crusher.
Surrounding the open pit we have what we call our waste dumps, where we stockpile the dirt. Eventually, once we’re done mining in that area, all that dirt’s gonna come back into that hole. Unless of course Los Angeles gets hold of it and turns it into a giant landfill. It ends up being a big, big hole. From the top going down I want to say it’s over a thousand feet.
My crew runs probably about forty people. We normally have at least one front-end loader operating, and one shovel, and then we have dozers that are working the dumps, we have a crusher crew working, water trucks, haul trucks, and graders.
It’s one of those jobs that you’re either gonna love or hate. You have to be of a certain mindset, because it can become very repetitious. Some days it feels like you’re doing the same thing just over and over and over. And some get very bored with it very fast.
EVERY DAY WE WORK, SAFETY IS BROUGHT UP
The equipment and the environment that we work in, it’s very unforgiving. We have more fatalities in the mining industry here in the United States than your firefighters and your police departments put together. In the U.S., both metal and nonmetal, open-pit mining and underground mining, including sandpits and gravel mines, in the past years, we average about five deaths a month.4
You always see on TV the underground miners who get trapped. But you don’t hear about the truck that rolled off the top of a dump at the sand and gravel mine and killed a driver. At a sand and gravel mine around Houston, Texas, they had an individual who had twenty-three years of experience working at a mine. And he got run over with a front-end loader that he was trying to fix, because the brakes weren’t set. But when you got tires that are twelve feet tall, you know, if it starts to roll forward and it catches you, it’s gonna kill you.
Every day we work, safety is brought up out there. We discuss it among ourselves. Case in point, we just had an incident not too long ago where one of the big haul trucks ran over a small pickup, completely crushing it. Thankfully no one was in the pickup. But we’re still talking about it. What if someone had been in the pickup? What would I have done differently? What could the driver have done differently? Basically we pick it to death to find out the why, the how, and most importantly what we can do so it doesn’t happen again.
Besides the human error factor in a lot of fatalities and injuries out there, you have the mechanical. Sometimes machines just break down, there’s no good reason. You know that a piece of equipment’s not always going to work right, no matter what you do. If it goes out of control, you’re just stuck along for the ride.
You got environmental factors too. We work twenty-four seven, day and night. When that sun goes down, that mine becomes a whole ’nother place of operations. Where you used to be able to see different things during the daylight, you can no longer can see ’em, and you’re doing the same job, backing up to a dump edge where you got a drop-off behind that dump, say two hundred, three hundred feet. It’s a little harder to see where that edge is, if the edge is cracking, things like that.
Normally, there’s about a six-foot berm that sits on the dump edge.5 And the haul truck drivers will back their trucks up, touch their rear tires against that berm, then stop and lift the bed of the truck, so all of the waste material goes over that berm and down the side of that dump.
They have to line both sets of tires up. And one of the big things to remember is that a full truck has around 256 tons of dirt. That’s not including the weight of the actual truck. And you go up to these edges, and you’re lifting that bed in the air, and dumping this material over. Depending on the material that you’re working in, we have what’s referred to as sloughing, where the edges of these dumps literally break off and fall down. There’s so many different factors that you have to be aware of out there. It can actually get pretty intimidating.
A lot of times, even if you know there’s a safety issue, a lot of that still comes down to that human error factor. Just bad judgment calls on the part of the employee.
And the company pushes production. A lot of your supervisors out there, they get bonuses based on their performance and their performance is judged on their production, so if it wasn’t for the union they would be pushing production a lot harder, which in turn means skipping safety procedures.6
When the wall fell on me, I should not have been digging in that area. Yes, I should have stopped digging, but I had reported the situation to my supervisor, and they still continued to have me dig in that area.
I was digging kernite, one of the ores that we mine at U.S. Borax. It has the consistency of dirt with big boulders in it. It gets processed into boric acid, which you find in the majority of your bug killers.
The accident happened one day in March 2005, around eleven thirty or noon. I wasn’t actually in the bottom; I was in what we refer to as extension 33Z. We call that kind of area where we’re digging into a “bench.” We build a dig face in front of us with the front-end loader. The dig face should be no higher than about thirty feet. Thirty-five would be pushing it. And I was working a dig face that was topping forty-five feet. It was too big of a wall for me to be actually working.
I had just come back from taking my lunch. And I think I loaded one or two more trucks, and then the others took off for lunch. I went to clean up my work area where I had some spillage, and I moved my loader in towards the wall. And before I could put it into reverse and back up, the whole dig face just started breaking off and collapsing down on top of me.
It had cracked farther back where I couldn’t see it, and then I just happened to look up and see this wall of dirt falling at me.
My first reaction was literally, Oh shit. I had the skiff into reverse and I was trying to back up, thinking, I can get backed up before it hits me. But that didn’t quite work. The dirt hit me, it broke the windshield of the loader, and the whole time I’m looking at all this dirt that had completely buried the front of my loader. The only thing I could think of was, Well, the engine’s still running, I can back up. What I didn’t know was my back tires were about eight feet off the ground.
When that dirt came down—we’re talking probably at least a hundred tons flying down—when it hit the front end of the loader, it caused the rear end of it to jump up into the air, so I was actually kind of sitting with my front end buried and my rear end sticking up in the air.
The dust settled and I knew I couldn’t back the skiff up. I had a windshield that was lying on me. I couldn’t get out of my seat because it had me pinned down in there. I was thinking, Okay, now I gotta call somebody. They’re going to have to come help me; they’re gonna have to move this dirt so I can lift this off my legs so I can get out.
So I finally had to call for help. A water truck driver, Richard Harvell, had heard me call and he told me later that he knew something was wrong because I guess my voice had pitched up really high. He and Mike Green, one of our roving mechanics who happened to be in the area, both showed up at the same time to give me a hand. They told me later when they first pulled up, they were amazed I wasn’t dead, because that’s how bad it looked. All they could see was the fallen wall covering the front of the cab. Richard was actually more freaked out than I was. He didn’t know what kind of injuries I might’ve had.
He and Mike called to me and told me they were there, and he climbed off his water truck and climbed up the dirt to get access to my loader and got all the way up to the cab. He helped move the dirt off the windshield so I could lift it up, so I could get out the cab door. And then he helped me over the side and we both got down to the ground safely.
I was standing down there on the ground and I got adrenaline going like crazy. I didn’t realize till I got down off the equipment and turned around and looked back, I thought, Oh my God, that could’ve killed me. A lot of people thought that, too. Their first question was, “How bad was the operator injured?”
I had a little red mark on my forehead from bumping it on the windshield. That was the extent of my injuries, which to this day I am very thankful for. It was a lot of luck, and wearing a seat belt. The accident gave me quite a reality check, it drove home just exactly how dangerous the job is.
I wasn’t written up, I was not disciplined in any way, shape, or form, until three months later they put me right back in the same area, almost the same exact situation. And I started feeling uncomfortable in the area because the wall was getting up there in height. I called my supervisor and told him, “This is the same situation happening again.” He came out and looked it over, said, “You know what? You’re right.” He pulled me out of the area, sent me to another area to dig. And we just left that area.
Three weeks later, the mine superintendent and the general mine manager were driving around the mine, just looking at different areas. They saw where I had left the digging and claimed that I had left a dangerous situation, that I had left an unstable wall, even though I had called my supervisor and he pulled me out of the area.
There was no damage, there was no injury, there was no incident, but they used that situation to disqualify me as a front-end loader operator. I think it was because the company was fined when that wall fell on me and they were found to be more at fault. I believe my whole disqualification was in retaliation for that. So they demoted me down to being a miner, so I was driving the smaller haul trucks.
I spent two years fighting to get my seniority and qualification back, and going through the grievance process is what really drove me to get involved with the union. My shop steward at the time, Vince Avitto, was really there for me.7 He was always encouraging me. He always kept me informed of what was going on, and he inspired me. We would be talking about my case and he would bring up other issues going on in the plant, and he would make this comment, “We could always use more stewards.” I said to myself, You know what? I can sit here and say, “He did a good job,” and go on my merry way or—I can step up. He helped me and I want to help other people.
The wall fell on me in 2005, they disqualified me a few weeks later, and I got my qualification to drive the front-end loader back in 2007. Starting in 2007, I became a steward. Most of what I worked on was real basic, everyday stuff. They paid a guy wrong—he took sick leave, they charged him for vacation, and so I would have to talk to his supervisor to get his pay straightened out. We would have individuals being called in, being disciplined over absenteeism, and I had to make sure all of that lined up with our contract and was fair. Just everyday stuff.
EVERY CONTRACT HAS BEEN A LITTLE MORE OF A FIGHT
Every contract that we’ve had going back to before I hired on, back into the early nineties, has seemingly been a little harder, a little more of a fight. Rio Tinto has made it pretty obvious over the years that they want the union out of here. From what I understand, one of the higher-up management people has literally said, “We want to get rid of the union.” Some of the individuals that the company has brought in to work here at Rio Tinto Boron, you can trace back their work history, and every place that they’ve worked, they’ve gone in and have worked at destroying the unions. We had a new guy around 2007 who had taken over our human resources, Kim Moulton, who came from Kennecott Copper in Utah,8 and Chris Robison who was CEO of Rio Tinto Minerals came down from Denver.
Around September 2009, we started into new contract negotiations with Rio Tinto.9 Pretty much right at the beginning, our worst fears were confirmed—that the company was out not just to break the union, but to destroy it by undoing almost everything we’d negotiated for decades.
They had pretty much taken our old contract, the one that we had been working under, and gotten rid of 90 percent of it. And they came in and they dropped this new contract on the table and said, “This is what we want.” In the new contract, they took away job security, they took away seniority, they were wanting to take away your right to a forty-hour workweek, and they wanted to take away the union shop.
Right now, we’re what’s considered a closed shop or “union shop.” To work as hourly out there now you have to be in the union; you automatically pay union dues. The company wanted to make it so that paying union dues could be voluntary, that if you didn’t want to be a union member, you didn’t have to be.10
My union dues are about $43 out of each paycheck. And some people say, “Well, yes, it should be my choice to pay that.” What they need to understand is that $43 goes to secure that I’m going to have forty hours a week where I get to come into work, that the company can’t say, “Hey Terri, we don’t need you today, so you gotta go home and you’re not going to get paid.”
Our union is out there to make sure that we have jobs to go to every day. And that we have safe jobs to go to every day. And that you don’t have to worry about, Well, this supervisor doesn’t like me. If it wasn’t for my union, some guy could fire me just ’cause he didn’t like the color of my hair.
The way our original contract read, there was a clause that said if Rio Tinto has employees who can do the job, we’ve got to do the job. They can’t bring in contractors from the outside and have them do our jobs. And one of the things that they wanted to do with this new contract is they wanted to eliminate that clause. They wanted to bring in whoever they wanted, and they wanted to be able to contract our jobs out. Instead of paying the employees their regular wage for what they’re doing, they would literally go out and find somebody who could do it cheaper. They’re a subcontractor, and so technically they don’t have to pay medical or dental. And liability-wise, it’s cheaper on them. Because if a contractor gets hurt, it’s almost one of those, “Oh well, we don’t have to worry about getting sued because they’re a contractor. They’ll go after their headquarters, not after us.”
On November 4, 2009, our old contract expired, and the company tried to extend it for another 120 days. The union wasn’t willing to do that. We wanted to keep working, and we wanted to keep negotiating. Between September and November, the company really was dragging its feet on any negotiations. The different department heads from the mine would come in, they would sit down at the table with the union, they would be in there for like thirty-five minutes, then they’d get up and walk out. And then they wouldn’t come back to the table for the rest of the day.
I heard a lot about the negotiations from the Contract Action Team,11 and I attended negotiations myself sometimes. Every union member was encouraged to be there, because our negotiations were open. We couldn’t talk during the sessions—we had a negotiating team that spoke for the union body—but we could sit and hear what was going on.
On our negotiating team, besides our union president, our vice president, and our lawyer, we had an individual to represent each department: the truck shop, the mine department, instrumentation and electricians, the boric acid plant, processing plants one through four, the shipping department, the labs, and the pilot plant.12 That way each section had someone at the table who knew the department’s needs.
Just like we had a representative from each department, on the management side you had whoever was in charge of the department. For the mine department, for example, we had Mike Wickersham, the general mine manager. Most of them were pretty well known to us.
They were being directed by Rio Tinto headquarters. We could tell Kim Moulton and Chris Robison were running it. They were the only ones to speak, but sometimes we would hear comments from our managers and supervisors. They would say, “I don’t have a say-so in any of this, it’s their show.” Our managers were pretty disgruntled.
The company and the union continued meeting, with the exception of the break over Christmas and New Year’s. They were still meeting pretty much two, three times a week until January 28. I was actually at the negotiation that day. They met at ten o’clock in the morning.
We went into the room, and our negotiating team was there. Then the company management’s negotiating team walked in. They sat down. The way they would always start these negotiations, everybody introduced who they were and where they were from. Right off the bat when they started to open up the negotiations, the company’s head representatives, just in a heartbeat, said, “Nope, we’re not doing this.” They dropped their original contract back on the table, the same one they’d put out in September, and they said, “You have until January 31 at 7:00 a.m. If this contract is not signed, we’re gonna lock you out.” And then they got up and they walked out of the room.
It was very quiet. Our lawyer Danny Bush and our negotiating team, we were just sitting in there, like, “Oh my God, did that just happen?”
THEY WERE READY TO STAND UP. THEY WERE READY TO FIGHT.
We had to call an emergency union meeting to vote on whether or not we were going to accept that contract. We had the meeting Saturday, because Sunday was Rio Tinto’s deadline. You know, I’ve attended a few union meetings over the years, but I’ve never seen that many union people come together that fast. The place was packed. We had a good 350 to 400 union members there. There were people who couldn’t be there because they were working, but I think the majority of union members drove from wherever they had to drive. A lot of people drove an hour one way just to come to that meeting.
I would say 99 percent of the people who showed up at that meeting that Saturday had already made up their minds. By that time the workers were just so fed up with the company—with the arrogance, with the attitude. The way they were wanting to treat us as disposable. The employees themselves had just gotten sick and tired of it. And they were ready to stand up. They were ready to fight.
Boron’s a scrappy little town. We got about 150 to 200 of the workforce out there who live in Boron today. At least another 150 to 200 had some way or another grown up around Boron or have relatives in Boron. And if one thing can be said about the people of Boron, it is that they’re fighters.
The Boron High School football team, the Bobcats, right there is a perfect example. You’re talking about a high school with probably less than 250 kids in it. Yet they’re a championship team. Every year. And it’s that attitude. And it’s that drive and that heart. It not only affects that football team, and that school, but the town.
And it overflows into a lot of the workers who live in Boron or who grew up in Boron. We bring that same attitude to work with us every day. And I think that attitude is why we were able to stand up to ’em.
The vote was pretty unanimous. Nobody was taking that contract. And I think that really surprised the company because I think their game tactic was, the country was already in an economic downturn, jobs were disappearing, unemployment was going up. People were afraid; 401(k)s, savings plans, and all that took major hits. And I think the company seriously thought, “Hey, we can scare them into a contract.”
I think it shocked them when we turned around and said, “No. Lock us out.” Which, of course, they did.
January 31 was my first day to go back to work. I had been at negotiations when they told us to either accept the contract or get locked out. I was at the union meeting when we voted down that contract. But me and a lot of my co-workers went to work expecting to actually work. We were expecting to call their bluff.
I drove all the way into the parking lot where I would normally park my car, got out of my car, and walked up to the gate for the mine department. There were seven or eight of us walking up to the gate at that time. General mine manager Mike Wickersham was actually standing there at that gate telling us, “No, you can’t come in.” He told us we could go pick up our checks later that day at the pizza parlor in town.
It was like getting punched in the stomach. My first thought was, Oh my God. I was in shock. I could not believe they had actually locked us out.
Just off the company property there’s an asphalted area, a truck turnout, and that’s where we went. Some went down to the union hall but the rest of us were out on the pavement, just outside the company property. There was a lot of anger. Some workers felt betrayed. I felt more betrayed than angry that the company would actually treat us that way. All kinds of things ran through my head: How long is this going to last? Am I going to be able to get unemployment? What am I going to do for money? I was worried about my daughter Ashley, about my mother, about losing my house, everything.13
But during the lockout we never got discouraged. We knew that plant, we knew how things operated, what it took to get product out. Even though the company was putting out media reports saying, “We’re running at 100 percent,” a lot of us could just stand at the gate and look towards the plant and say, “They’re not even running that plant.” We had guys who could tell you exactly what plants were running, when they were running, and how much they were producing just by the steam and smoke coming out. We would have truck drivers who would go in to pick up orders and turn around twelve hours later and come out and say, “I spent all day in there and they still haven’t got my order ready.” A lot of that kept us encouraged.
For those three and a half months I was running my butt off. Between me and my mother, we had the food bank committee. At least one day a week we’d show up to make packages of the food to be taken to union families who were in need.14 I was on the communications committee and I had at least two gate duties.15 Wednesdays from six p.m. to ten p.m. and Saturday from two p.m. to six p.m. And I was speaking with reporters, doing interviews, going to other local events. Time just flew.
My mother was with me 100 percent all the way. I tried to keep my daughter out of a lot of the activity and stress of the lockout. She would go to some of the rallies with us, but I didn’t try to force her to be too involved. But one time towards the beginning of the lockout, she said to me, “That’s okay, Mom, I have plenty of clothes, I have plenty of everything. You just do what you need to do.”
When we went into this lockout we knew what we didn’t want to do. We knew we didn’t want to get violent, we didn’t want to be portrayed that way. The 1974 strike out here was a short strike, I think it only lasted something like four and a half months, but during that time period, it was very volatile.16 There was a lot of violence, and it ripped people apart. You had brother who wouldn’t speak to brother, fathers and sons who wouldn’t talk.
During that strike, some union members crossed that picket line. People were throwing rocks at cars, and the guard shack, I think it was the guard shack, or purchasing, got firebombed. The memory of that 1974 strike was one of the biggest things in our minds.
We weren’t going to let the company push us or instigate us into doing something that would make us look bad and harm our cause. They tried constantly. The guards that they had, the security team, Gettier, if you go check their website these guys advertise themselves as strike busters. They guarantee that they will get injunctions against picket lines and stuff like this because what they do, they constantly videotape, and what they’re looking for is somebody breaking the law. Then they go to the local court and get an injunction to where you can’t have a picket line or you can’t be standing in front of their property. That’s what they tried to do. Thankfully, every single person that we had out there conducted themselves in a very good manner, and they were never able to do that with us. Everybody kind of watched everybody else’s back.
One of the best things that came out of that lockout was the union members really got the chance to talk with one another. When we’re out there working, we kind of get locked into our own little sections. Like with me, I’m out in that open-pit mine. I don’t really get that big of an opportunity to talk with the guys who work in the shipping department, or talk with people who work at the boric acid plant, or who work in the primary process. You don’t get a lot of interaction time with these individuals while on the job. And that lockout brought people from all different parts of that plant together, got them talking with each other, and, more importantly, got them supporting each other.
Support came in a lot of different forms, from families sharing recipes on how to make food stretch, to where to go for the best food prices, to even, if somebody had something a little extra, giving it to the next person. From Boron to go to the bigger grocery stores you’re looking at anywhere from a thirty- to a fifty-mile one-way trip, so instead of just one family getting in the car and going, maybe three or four wives would get together and they’d carpool over. There was a lot of carpooling going on.
I’m not going to sit here and say that the lockout didn’t affect people because, financially and emotionally, it affected a lot of people. We had quite a few people who could not survive on unemployment. We had individuals who were working and tried to find other work, but they still faced bankruptcy. They still faced foreclosures.
I was lucky enough that I had my mother who lived with me, and with her Social Security and what she draws from the Veterans Administration from my father, she was able to help me out.17 I made enough on unemployment that I was able to cover my house payment and my utility bills. But if it hadn’t been for my mother, it would have gotten real tight about putting food on the table, about having gas for the cars.
Because of my daughter, I qualified for state Medi-Cal.18 Continuing on my health insurance plan, just for myself and my daughter, would have cost over $450 a month. I couldn’t afford that. There were a lot of people out there who couldn’t afford that.
Most people, if they had kids, they qualified for Medi-Cal. But we had a lot of older employees whose kids were grown. They didn’t qualify for it. And they were the ones with the bigger health issues, who had medications that they were required to take. And they couldn’t afford to pay for health insurance. So the ILWU had set up a relief fund, and they utilized a lot of that money for people to keep their medical insurance during that time we were locked out.
We reached out for support and a lot of people responded. It wasn’t just our local community. We got support from people all over the world, people sending contributions or speaking out for us. We had unions down in Los Angeles, the AFL-CIO, the teamster unions, the ILWU—our Local 20 down in Wilmington, Local 13 down in San Pedro, our international contacts. A number of unions sent contributions or organized protests. We had the Maritime Union of Australia. We had representatives from Turkey, from South Africa, from New Zealand, from the Netherlands, from England.
Just the show of support from people was amazing. And knowing you had those people backing you up, that you had somebody, they might not be right there but they were supporting you, encouraging you; it gave us the strength to stay out there and fight. If it hadn’t been for them, the company probably would’ve destroyed our union.
The lockout woke local people up to just how fragile the economy is. The majority of people who live in Boron earn their paychecks right out at that mine, so when that mine goes, that town goes. That became very clear, especially to the business owners. They did what they could to help out and try to support their businesses—things like helping provide food and drinks to the people working gate duty. One of the restaurants, the Twenty Mule Café, gave a 20 percent discount to union members and their families. It was little things like that that helped.
During the strike, the ILWU set up an emergency fund that gathered contributions from union locals and individuals, to be distributed to union families in need. The international conference of mining and maritime unions met in Palmdale, California, on February 16 and 17, 2010, and traveled to Boron for a rally. Allies in the International Transport Workers’ Federation and the International Dockworkers Council organized protests at the Rio Tinto shareholders’ meetings in London and Melbourne in April 2010. Closer to home, the California School Employees Association led a march through Boron for “Good Jobs and Good Schools” on March 6, 2010, that brought out hundreds of workers and their families.
More than two months after initiating the lock out, Rio Tinto came back to the bargaining table in April 2010. After another month of negotiations, Rio Tinto and Borax workers agreed to a new labor contract on May 15, 2010.
We had even more people for the ratification than for the meeting where we voted down the contract. People had a lot of questions. They wanted to know, “Is this good for us or will it hurt us?” It was not the most perfect contract, but we weren’t losing our benefits or jobs. We weren’t forced to pay for medical care or take a pay cut. My big concerns were taking away our Veterans Day holiday and taking away jobs to give to contractors, and we were able to avoid all that.19
It was a ballot vote, and we had to wait for the count. It was nerve-wracking. I went to work and stood at the gate. The very first day they locked us out, I was on that gate, and the day we voted and counted the ballots, I was doing my gate duty too. About four or five in the evening on May 15, someone came down and said, “Take down the picket line, the contract is in.”
When we all came back to work, everybody was happy to be doing the job that we wanted to do, earning that paycheck, being able to support our families. All the locked-out union people who wanted to come back got their jobs back. But every one of us knew, we understood, and we still believe today—we won the battle, but the war still rages on.
They are just constantly trying to undermine the union.
We have a contract and you can actually sit there and read a contract. It’s written in black and white. And then you have the company who comes along and says, “Oh, well, that’s open to interpretation.” And it becomes a constant fight over wording. For example, overtime. It’s supposed to be scheduled first with the person with the lowest extra hours and then you work your way up to the person who already has put in the highest hours so everyone gets an equal chance to earn the overtime. And the company will actually come in and say, “Well, no, it doesn’t read that way.” And we’re like, “Yes, it does.”
The way our contract reads, you should be trained according to seniority. Highest senior person will get offered the training first, and then it goes right down the line. What we find is if one of the people who gets hired is a supervisor’s son, management seems to be saying, “You know, Joe Smith, the supervisor over in this department, that’s his son. We’re going to train him first. We’re going to get him up to the higher rate of pay first.”
I think the lockout did a lot of good in making people aware that, hey, you do need to stand up, hey, you do need to speak out, you can’t let the company blatantly violate rules, whether it’s our contract or government or environmental rules. We can’t just let them do what they want, and I think finally people are coming to that understanding.
Here we were, six hundred employees standing up against a multibillion-dollar corporation. All the lawyer talk and everything else put aside, it was the people coming together, and joining together, and supporting one another, and helping one another. That’s what really won this fight for us.
I’m proud of the fight we put up, but it’s hard to say what’s in our future. Optimistically, you’re looking at the life expectancy of that mine to be only about another thirty years. Once they’ve mined everything they can mine out of it, there’s a big question as to what happens next for our town, and nobody seems to have that answer. Workers my age, we’re just hoping there’s going to be a mine to retire from. The younger ones coming up behind me, they’re going to have to set their minds to the fact that there isn’t going to be a mine that will employ them until they retire.
My daughter Ashley, she took some time off after high school to help me take care of my mom, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011. Now Ashley’s looking for employment, looking to take some online classes. She’s hoping to go into some form of graphic design. I hope she learned from the lockout that in this day and age, you need an education to get the good jobs—and if you see wrong, you need to stand up and speak out. One person can make a change.
1 Locked Out 2010 follows the contract dispute between Borax workers and Rio Tinto.
2 Boron is a town of just over two thousand residents. It’s located about 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles and west of the Mojave Desert.
3 The multinational mining conglomerate Rio Tinto bought U.S. Borax in 1968. The subsidiary is now called Rio Tinto Boron, though employees sometimes still refer to their employer as U.S. Borax.
4 According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average yearly number of miner deaths in the U.S. from 2006 through 2010 was thirty-five. During the seventies and eighties, one hundred to two hundred and fifty miners were killed in the U.S. each year.
5 A berm is a wall of dirt piled at the edge of the pit to keep dump trucks from backing up too far.
6 The workers at U.S. Borax voted in 1964 to join the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and became ILWU Local 30. Their contract covered everyone who worked in the mine, the processing plant, and the maintenance department, as well as some of the office staff.
7 In nonunion workplaces, the employer can hire, punish, fire, and set pay and rules without input from workers. A union contract, negotiated between employees and their employer, gives workers a say in their pay and conditions, and a grievance procedure to protect them against arbitrary or undeserved discipline or firing and other breaches of the contract. Shop stewards act as advocates during the grievance process and help ensure the contract is respected. For more on shop stewards, see glossary, page 348.
8 Kennecott Copper is a subsidiary of Rio Tinto.
9 A process known as collective bargaining. For more information, see glossary, page 348.
10 Employers often push for a contract clause that makes union membership optional, which makes the workplace an “open shop.” Unions bargain for the “closed shop” Terri refers to, in which everyone who is covered by the contract must be a union member.
11 ILWU Local 30 formed the Contract Action Team to distribute information and coordinate actions as needed during the negotiations. The union members on the team passed out flyers and newsletters and talked with co-workers to be sure everyone stayed informed on the progress of the talks and to minimize the rumors that inevitably arise during negotiations.
12 The pilot plant tests new equipment.
13 During a lockout, work is shut down on the initiative of the business in a labor dispute rather than the workers. When workers initiate a shutdown, it’s called a strike. In many states in the U.S. (including California) workers who are locked out during a labor dispute are eligible for unemployment insurance, though striking workers are often not eligible for unemployment. For more on lockouts, strikes, and unemployment insurance, see glossary, page 348.
14 Union members all over the United States contributed money to purchase food for the locked-out families, working through the local and national American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) networks and other labor organizations such as the Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
15 The workers maintained picket lines at the two plant gates at all times throughout the lockout. They scheduled four-hour shifts with five to nine people at each gate on each shift.
16 In 1974, the company proposed a contract that cut sick leave, pensions, and holidays, eliminated safety rules, and allowed the company free rein to contract out work. The workers struck for four and a half months. Though they ultimately had to give in to most of the demands, they were able to regain lost ground in the years that followed.
17 The United States Department of Veterans Affairs, formerly called the Veterans Administration, manages pensions and other compensation for U.S. military veterans and their families.
18 Medi-Cal (the California Medical Assistance Program) is the state’s public health insurance program for low-income families, seniors, people with disabilities, pregnant women, children in foster care, and some low-income adults.
19 The contract ratified by ILWU Local 30 members on May 15, 2010, did include a couple of take-backs. All newly hired workers now get 401(k) plans instead of the more secure defined benefit pensions, and workers are no longer able to sue over violations of wage and hour law. All wage and hour disputes have to be arbitrated.