Copper Crucible

A Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Book for 1995”

“Jonathan D. Rosenblum’s history of this one strike reveals to us, in chapter and verse, the barbaric use of power by the corporate big boys. It is a stunning metaphor for labor’s trouble today.”―Studs Terkel (from a review of the first edition)

“Rosenblum writes with the verve of a good journalist and the empirical precision of a fine scholar. He is as deft at sketching brief portraits of key executives, union officials, and rank-and-file strikers as he is at untangling the legal skein in which the miners got fatally ensnared.”―Michael Kazin, New York Times Book Review (from a review of the first edition)

In this new edition, Jonathan D. Rosenblum describes the resurgence in 1996 and 1997 of union activism at Local 890 in Silver City, New Mexico, the famous “Salt of the Earth” union. Phelps Dodge obliterated all the unions at its Arizona properties in the devastating 1983 campaign of permanent replacement documented in Copper Crucible. The company later acquired the Chino mine in western New Mexico; with the copper ore came the elements of union rebirth. When Phelps Dodge officials argued that “while unions may have had a purpose in the past, that time is gone,” they rekindled the union’s fighting spirit, according to Rosenblum. Local 890 beat back Phelps Dodge’s 1996 decertification campaign, handing the company its first major setback against unions in fifteen years.