Letter from a Colorado Mining Industry Worker

The mining industry fills an incredibly important need in the modern world. It provides billions of tons of raw materials to be used as concrete in building foundations, copper wiring in windmills, neodymium in the magnets of MRI machines, and much more. Many of these metals, in particular the rare earth elements (REE), are dominantly produced and refined within the People’s Republic of China, or by corporations of PRC origin in other countries who have favorable diplomatic relations with the PRC. This has led to economic nationalism and fear-mongering by politicians in the United States and Europe who wish to reassert their dominance in all possible economic markets.

Many may be familiar with the buzz surrounding “critical minerals” such as the REE, cobalt, and lithium. But the sum total of these pales in comparison to mined materials such as sand and gravel, iron ore, and copper production. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimates that in 2022, 960 million tons of sand and gravel worth approximately $10 billion was produced in the US alone. In addition, American firms produced 46 million tons of iron ore worth $5.2 billion, and 1.3 million tons of copper worth $11 billion.

By comparison, just 43,000 metric tons of REE worth $530 million, 800 metric tons of cobalt worth $53 million, and 5,000 tons of lithium worth about $250–300 million (depending on the exact ore grade and end use) were produced in the US for the year 2022. We shouldn’t be distracted by the bourgeois media’s excessive coverage of critical minerals and the closely associated “danger of Chinese domination” regarding the extraction of such materials. These minerals are undoubtedly important, but if we’re looking for where workers can put the most leverage on the bosses’ pocketbooks, we must first focus on those sectors which employ the majority of workers and the majority of capital in this industry.

The reality of China’s critical metal dominance grew out of policies enacted in the US in the 1970s and 80s when the capitalists began shifting resource extraction and refining—including the pollution produced by it—to so-called developing nations that were eager to boost their national GDP and had sufficient resources to be exploited. China, in particular, capitalized on these policies. As the second-largest nation by land area and the largest by population, China had both abundant natural resources and labor to extract and refine such resources.

The final stages in refining metals often require the use of smelters, which are costly to permit, build, and operate. The byproducts of this process can be incredibly polluting when companies willfully forgo proper environmental protection measures, emitting sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, and releasing numerous heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, zinc, and nickel.

Starting in the 1980s, the US was eager to allow China to build new smelters in abundance, forcing Chinese workers to bear the burden of this final step. Other world powers such as Britain, France, and Germany participated in this imperialist resource extraction as well. A few decades later, Chinese finance capital has become one of the biggest players in imperialist resource extraction today.

Other advanced capitalist countries such as Canada and Australia have more fully embraced the mining sector within their borders, allowing it to grow into 5% and 10% of GDP respectively. However, both Canada and Australia have notoriously ignored the concerns of indigenous people in their pursuit of iron, gold, and silver. On August 4, 2014, a tailings pond at the Mount Polley Mine operated by Imperial Metals in Central British Columbia, was breached and released approximately 25 billion liters of contaminated materials into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek, and Quesnel Lake. This incident was sharply criticized by Amnesty International as a clear breach of human rights for the indigenous peoples who have resided in Central British Columbia for generations.

More recently, in May, 2020, the international mining giant Rio Tinto blasted through a rock structure believed to be the site of human occupancy nearly 46,000 years ago, in the Juukan Gorge of Australia. Why? To gain access to higher-grade iron ore at their Brockman 4 mine, of course! While this blast was perfectly “legal” under Australia’s current mining laws and regulations, it clearly shows the priorities of modern mining corporations: profit and high-grade ore over any consideration for sites considered sacred by indigenous peoples and the immense archaeological importance they hold. As always, the capitalist state ultimately serves the interests of the multinational banks and industrialists.

While not all mining corporations are guilty of such egregious actions against indigenous culture, the profit motive compels them to make decisions detrimental to the environment and the pressing need for a transition to renewable energy. Extractive industries are destructive by their very nature, and as long as humans depend on them they are a necessary evil. This only reaffirms our stance that these operations should be nationalized and democratically operated in the public interest, with input from those living near the mines themselves. Profit-greedy shareholders who live thousands of miles from these sites are not fit stewards of the Earth’s resources.

Within the US, the only union currently representing coal mine workers is the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The UMWA has flexed its muscles and struck against the bosses multiple times throughout its hundred-plus year history. Most recently, 1,000 UMWA workers at Warrior Met in Alabama went on strike for nearly two years, but went down to defeat after being isolated and sold out by their own leaders. Here in Colorado, 4,000 workers are represented by the UMWA, most of whom belong to the Navajo Nation.

The number of coal workers employed in the US has dramatically decreased even since 2018, from 52,000 to 38,000 in 2022, due to replacement by mechanization and a general decrease in coal production as cheaper natural gas has replaced coal as a fuel source. Although the UMWA, which also operates in Canada, has expanded to cover workers in industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and public employees, the potential for other mine workers to join this powerful union is immense. Some copper miners, for example, are already represented by the United Steelworkers union.

According to the USGS report, in 2022, there were an estimated 1.3 million workers in nonfuel mineral mining operations and the refinement of nonfuel products. While other industries can shutter a storefront overnight to stifle unionization efforts, mining corporations cannot do the same with a mine. These are often multibillion dollar endeavors that can take years, and sometimes decades to fully open. By combining forces in a much larger union, mine workers could exert far more pressure on the bosses—but only if the UMWA and the Steelworkers Union revive the militant class-struggle methods of its early days.

Of course, resistance by the ruling class will always be fierce, spreading their own propaganda and bringing in scab workers when strikes occur. However, many workers at mine sites or refinery facilities are highly trained geologists, engineers, metallurgists, and so on, and are difficult to replace, especially on short notice. Furthermore, there are growing lamentations in the industry about the decreasing number of qualified workers in these disciplines, as the education system has largely eschewed earth science education for decades, in particular, disciplines relevant for the mining industry.

This all culminates in a scenario highly favorable to the working class, with raw materials at the forefront of economic discussions, and well-trained workers to extract, refine, and insert these materials into the supply chain are in short supply. But in order to leverage this potential, mining industry workers must unite and adopt class-independent methods of struggle.

In the future socialist planned economy, the workers of the mining industry will direct the production of the planet’s natural resources with an eye toward sustainability. Workers currently engaged in extracting thermal coal will receive generous economic support as they transition to other socially necessary industries. Conditions are rotten ripe for expropriation of these crucial industries, which we cannot entrust to the capitalists.