The Desert Lockout: Miners Continue Street Actions, as Negotiations Restart

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5871/the_desert_lockout_miners_continue_street_actions_as_negotiations_rest/

Photo slideshow at link.

Friday April 16 3:12 pm

By R.M. Arrieta

BORON, CALIF.—It’s 6:15 a.m. and cars and trucks are coming down the long stretch of desert road to the main gate at the Rio Tinto/Borax facility. Soon, scores of vans and buses filled with replacement workers—what more than 500 locked-out workers call “scabs”—will be shuttled in and out of the gates. Union workers of Rio Tinto line the road, with bullhorns, shining lights at the passengers, jeering and hurling insults.

Some of the replacement workers smirk. They’re mostly the young ones. Some have the music cranked up loud. Some wear headphones. Some wear caps and cover their faces with knit material with holes cut out for their eyes, nose and mouths. Some look downright ashamed.

The company is paying their lodging at various hotels around the area. But not in Boron, where there is overwhelming support for the workers, now in month three of the lock-out. If these workers don’t get their jobs back, “this town will just dry up and blow away,” says Bill Galloway, one of the locked-out workers and a rank-and-file member of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 30. “It will be a town of extremely low-income people instead of healthy middle-class families.”

THE MULTINATIONAL SQUEEZE

Welcome to Boron, Calif. Population 2,000. Home to the state’s largest open pit mine and one of the richest borate deposits in the world. The mine produces almost half the global demand for borates from the California facility, according to the Borax company website.

Rio Tinto/Borax, the world’s third largest mining company, is based in London and Australia. Relations with the mine's workers, represented by Local 30, have been strained since Rio Tinto bought the U.S.-owned Borax facility in 1968. The first labor dispute boiled over in 1974, when 100 Kern County sheriff deputies were brought in and two helicopters patrolled the line filled with hundreds of angry workers. (You can read about it here.)

Today’s troubles are almost as contentious.

FULL story at link.