CLIFTON, ARIZONA (CN) — On a scorching hot afternoon in July, Dahl Warren retreated from the Arizona heat into what was once the local union hall in Clifton.
Inside, she reflected on a strike that played an important part in her life and forever changed this small mountain town in eastern Arizona. The copper miners’ union that once used this hall is long gone, but a dramatic mural at the center of the room offers a glimpse into the events that rocked this place almost 40 years ago.
The mural, 40 feet wide by 10 feet tall, depicts the miners’ strike of 1983. It shows protesters, armed soldiers and a row of faceless workers moving like an assembly line into the jaws of a fanged factory.
It’s a scene Warren remembers well. After all, she’s depicted in the mural.
“It was a hard time,” said Warren, now 69, looking up at a younger version of herself.
Deep in rural eastern Arizona, Clifton lies where the Sonoran Desert starts to climb into the White Mountains, ocotillo cactus giving way to ponderosa pines.
Morenci, an open-pit mine and company town, sits just up the road. It’s one of the world’s largest copper mines. Thousands of workers there drill and blast away copper from deep within the earth, leaving barren hills in their wake.
Downhill is Clifton, today a quiet town with around four thousand people and a smattering of still-open businesses. It used to be a small and diverse community of workers, but the miners’ strike of 1983 rocked the community to its core.
It’s been 40 years since the strike started, but its effects still reverberate not only in Clifton but throughout the organized labor movement. That’s because of the lengths mining executives went to break the town's union. The experience tore up Clifton, breaking community and familial bonds.
The strike is often overshadowed by then-President Ronald Reagan’s firing two years earlier of more than 11,000 unionized and striking air-traffic control workers — a defining moment often pointed to by progressives as the death knell of unions in the United States. But if Reagan killed organized labor, the body was buried in Clifton. In turn, the events in Clifton helped kill the blue-collar class solidarity that for decades defined left-wing politics in the United States.
Today, Clifton is a very different town. Still, the echoes of that history live on in the memories of residents and exiles who were part of and still remember that strike.
Those old residents remember something more vibrant: a community defined by a strong and multiethnic union. While ethnic divisions still permeated the town, Latinos rose to positions of power there, a rarity in the United States at the time.
“He was a union man,” said Angel Rodriguez, 83, reminiscing about his father in an interview at his home in the Phoenix area. His father was a member of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Clifton. Labor organizing was “his favorite subject, I think.”
The union was defined in part by a strike in the 1940s, which — in addition to securing better pay and working conditions — had also helped integrate mineworkers into one union. Before the strike, white and Latino and Native American workers were kept segregated, undermining worker power and making it easier to violently suppress non-white workers.
In the 1960s, the union joined the much larger United Steelworkers of America The merger let the union engage in a process called “pattern bargaining” in which negotiations between unions and companies set industry standards on issues like wages and benefits.
By the time he was in his early 30s, Rodriguez had followed his father into work at the Morenci mine. He rose steadily up the ranks of union leadership, ultimately becoming a grievance representative who helped fight for better working conditions. They were good years for the copper miners, defined by good pay and steady contracts.
