Western Federation of Miners - Mine Mill

Mine Mill

The failure of later strikes and the depression of 1914 brought about a sharp decline in the WFM's membership. In 1916 the union changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The union had become largely ineffective, riddled with members who passed information on to their employers, and unable to win substantial gains for its members for most of the next two decades.

Things changed, however, in 1934 when miners and smeltermen revitalized the union. Returning to its militant roots, the union spread throughout the west from its base in Butte, and then into the South and Canada. There were also union locals in non-ferrous smelters in New Jersey — in Perth Amboy at the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), and in Carteret at the U.S. Metals Company. The union was one of the original members of the Committee for Industrial Organizing, which later transformed itself into the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

The union also returned to its radical political traditions, as members of the Communist Party USA came to hold the presidency of the union in the late 1940s. That, however, sparked further disagreements over leadership and expenditures and, as the postwar red scare picked up momentum, prompted raids by the United Steelworkers of America, the United Auto Workers and other unions, particularly in mining in the South, where the CIO encouraged predominantly white miners' locals to defect. The CIO formally expelled the union in 1950 after it refused to remove its communist leaders.

The union soldiered on for another seventeen years, finding itself increasingly outmatched in its battles with employers. While it defeated all of the Steelworkers' efforts to replace it in its western strongholds in the 1950s, it had a harder time holding on to its outposts in the South. In addition, more conservative members, uneasy with the union's foreign policy and with the increasing number of African-American and Mexican-American unionists, tried to take their locals out of the union, opening up fissures that weakened the union's strikes against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in 1954 and 1959. The union eventually merged with the Steelworkers in 1967 after losing locals to it in Butte and Canada. Only Local 598 in Sudbury, Ontario, which had a contentious and sometimes violent history with the city's Steelworkers locals, voted against the merger — it remained autonomous until 1993, when it merged with the Canadian Auto Workers.