Western Federation of Miners/International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers

WESTERN FEDERATION OF MINERS/INTERNATIONAL UNION OF MINE, MILL AND SMELTER WORKERS. A legendary radical labor movement of the West, the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was in its early years an important section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and later one of the least typical “red” unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Midwifed by USArmy bayonets in prison camps (or “bullpens”) in Idaho, the union was marked in its various phases by federal intervention, rank-and-file agitation, hardrock miners’ demands for safer working conditions with improved pay, and exemplary interracial relations.

The WFM grew out of the 1892 defeat of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, miners who were resisting massive wage reductions. Officially founded the next year in Butte, Montana, the new union vowed to defend miners from the misuse of new technology that, by producing greater amounts of rock dust, increased the incidence of silicosis. The WFM, influenced by socialists such as Eugene V. Debs and by the need for solidarity, supported the formation of the American Labor Union, an effort of scattered workers in western states to create a more democratic, industrial alternative to the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor. In 1905, the WFM joined the IWW as its metal mining branch—a decision unpopular in Butte, where many miners viewed the IWW as a divisive political rather than industrial organization. Controversy and splits over this move foreshadowed later difficulties faced by the union over its political orientation.

Political infighting and the reluctance of other major unions to join the IWW prompted the WFM to withdraw from the movement in 1907. The actual organization of miners, now split between the WFM and the IWW, weakened as a result. The WFM nevertheless remained in its own way a radical organization, its influential Miners Magazine widely regarded as a socialistic organ.

World War I and the spread of electrification greatly increased the demand for copper. WFM locals in Michigan and Arizona struggled to maintain working conditions and to raise wages as the cost of living soared. Mine owners and the US government fought back. In the bloody 1913 Calumet Copper Strike, casualties included eighty-nine children killed in a Christmas Day fire (an event later memorialized by Woody Guthrie). In Arizona, WFM and IWW members and supporters were deported at gunpoint and left in the desert without water. Repression and worsening conditions destroyed the Butte Miners Union the following year and prompted the rise of IWW organizing activities, in the course of which IWW organizer Frank Little was lynched. Persistent federal intervention, anti-subversive legislation, and miners’ rage inspired former Pinkerton detective Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.
In 1916 the WFM formally became the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMS), thereby recognizing the jurisdiction of the metalliferous mining industrial of the American Federation of Labor. Surviving further factionalism and the lean years of the 1920s, the IUMMS developed afresh during the New Deal and expanded its organizing activities into the East and South. Nonwestern locals were, however, to be a source of opposition to the union leadership.

Southern locals, sites of key victories in civil rights and pay standards, were able to capitalize upon traditions of regional coal-miners, federal government neutrality, and the expanding economy of the World War II. The northeastern advance, essentially a majority of the union’s die-casting division (which had amalgamated a formerly independent union into the IUMMS in 1934), sharply raised the issue of Communist influence within the International. Charges of corruption surrounding the otherwise democratic and hard-working union president, Reid Robinson, weakened the IUMMS within the CIO. The passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (IUMMS leaders refused to sign loyalty oaths and refused a referendum on the question) permitted internal opponents, often well organized, such as the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists and its supportive Catholic clergy, to accelerate secession movements. Neither the resignations of Reid Robinson nor of his successor, admitted Communist Maurice Travis, prevented the union’s expulsion from the CIO in 1950. By that time the union was practically limited to western miners, who remained largely unshaken by the “red” charges. In the 1960s, however, the weakening union suffered extensive raids from the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers. At a 1967 membership of 46,000—just slightly higher than its total thirty year earlier—the IUMMS merged into the Steelworkers Union.

The IUMMS is often cited for its pioneer policies in race relations and in women’s involvement. During the 1940s, the union won a lawsuit to end the copper companies’ custom of keeping separate payrolls for Anglo-American males, paying all others less. In the South, union policies of integration in work force and leadership were decried as a proof of communistic domination. In one of the best-known labor conflicts of the 1950s, the wives of mainly Chicano miners in Boyard, New Mexico, picketed in place of their husbands, who were forbidden to do so by injunction, and added new demands for their own welfare. This conflict was dramatized in the film Salt of the Earth.

Jensen, Vernon H. Heritage of Conflict. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950.

Jensen, Vernon H. Non-Ferrous Metals Industrial Unionism, 1932–1954. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974.

Lingenfelter, Richard. The Hardrock Miners. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.

WFM-IUMMS Records. Western Historical Collections, Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder. https://archives.colorado.edu/repositories/2/resources/225