Revisiting the ‘Salt of the Earth’

There was a single-vehicle fatality on the Pacific Coast Highway near Oxnard Oct. 28, and with it, in a manner of speaking, went the salt of the earth.

The car carried 82-year-old film maker Paul Jarrico on his way home to Ojai from a Hollywood ceremony to (50 years after the fact) celebrate his work. One need not know Jarrico to understand why his name had recently been all over the news: blacklisted producer, Academy Award nominee (“Tom, Dick and Harry”), unflagging friend, creator of the classic union strike film, “Salt of the Earth.”

But Jarrico would have been surprised by the line in his Times obituary stating that his most famous movie chronicled “a Mexican mine workers strike.” Jarrico’s lifelong radical credo was “With me, it was not, my country right or wrong; it was my country, right the wrong.”

“Salt of the Earth,” made in 1953, was emphatically about a U.S. union of Mexican American zinc miners in New Mexico--a fictionalization of a real strike in 1951 by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Ironically, the very New Mexico union whose struggle Jarrico discovered in the 1950s stands today at the precipice, pitted against an end-of-the-century corporate plague against unions known as Phelps Dodge Corp.

Jarrico would not want those now waking up to his life or to the film “Salt of the Earth” to miss the dramatic, ongoing sequel. [“Salt of the Earth is scheduled to be shown Monday at 6:45 p.m. on the Turner Classic Movies cable TV channel.]

Phelps Dodge has built a reputation for what even the Wall Street Journal has described as “sheer ruthlessness” in its labor relations. In 1917, the company arranged to have 1,200 alleged union sympathizers forced at gunpoint into boxcars and railroaded out of Bisbee, Ariz. In 1983, using legal arsenals (but stocking the mine with rifles in case that failed), the company permanently replaced more than 1,000 workers rather than agree to a union contract. The unions are gone in Arizona. Just one big union holds on in New Mexico, Steelworkers Local 890 (formerly the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers)--the union from Jarrico’s movie.

But if Phelps Dodge has its way, that union, too, will soon be on the way out. Despite the highest profits in its more than 150 years in business--$740 million in 1995--the company in early 1996 launched a brutal campaign to decertify Local 890, declaring, “While unions may have had a purpose in the past, that time is gone.” The company also signaled employees that they faced weaker job security if they kept the union.

To underline its threats, Phelps Dodge has dug in at the bargaining table, refusing a base wage increase and leaving the union without a contract for the past year and a half. Despite its massive profits, the company has also demanded 12-hour shifts, more nonunion subcontracting and reduced retirement benefits.

If the union strikes, Phelps Dodge has left open the option of using the same policy that made it famous in 1983--kill the union with nonunion replacements. Even without a strike, the company has launched another effort to decertify the union.

“Salt of the Earth” recounted wage discrimination against Mexican Americans, their segregation in separate facilities and dangerous mine conditions. When the women’s strike auxiliary took up the pickets (and the jail cells) in response to an injunction against the men, the union finally prevailed over Empire Zinc. Forty years later, in “Salt of the Earth II,” Phelps Dodge is in the process of destroying the union community that those families struggled for and won. Instead, the company should be celebrating the productivity and success of its work force by granting a wage increase and ceasing its effort to decertify Local 890.

To borrow from Paul Jarrico, it’s time for the company to “right the wrong.”