With Prices in the Pits, Arizona’s Copper Industry Loses Its Luster
Carrie Schlink admits she feels a little uncomfortable sitting at a computer wearing makeup and business attire as she trains for a new career as an office assistant.
Schlink, 44, would much rather be working at her old job. For 11 years she toiled at BHP Copper’s Pinto Valley mine, manning massive hydraulic drills and driving super-size dump trucks loaded with 200 tons of copper ore carved from the 1,400-foot-deep open pit.
“I loved my job,” says Schlink, a divorced mother of three who earned $16.80 an hour and developed the bulging biceps of a weightlifter.
But when copper prices in February 1998 sunk to depths not seen in years, BHP Copper shut down most production at Pinto Valley. Schlink and 500 other miners suddenly found themselves out of work.
“I was planning on retiring from that place,” says Schlink, who earned $7.80 an hour during a four-month federal job-training program that ended March 30. “I and a lot of people weren’t prepared for it.”
At the start of the 20th century copper was king in Arizona, with one of every four workers employed in the mining trade. On the brink of a new millennium, however, the industry is no longer the cornerstone of the state’s so-called “Five C’s” economy--copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate.
From the advent of computerized equipment to new and cheaper methods of extracting ore from rock, technological advances have pared the number of miners needed to dig copper from Arizona’s deserts to about 12,000. The service industry, Arizona’s top industry, employs 634,000.
Leaving Towns
Thousands of miners and their families streamed out of once-thriving mining towns like Globe, Miami, Bisbee, Jerome, Douglas, Morenci, Superior and Ajo in the last 50 years as fickle copper prices, declining ore quality and other factors led to mine closures or cutbacks.
Recent financial crises in Asia and Latin America have sapped demand for copper--a key component of homes, automobiles and computers--and a worldwide glut of the precious metal has sent prices reeling. A pound of copper, worth a record $1.40 in June 1997, now fetches only about 65 cents.
But the industry, if not exactly prospering at the moment, is far from dead.
Arizona produces two-thirds of the copper mined in this country, and production from about a dozen working copper mines, both open-pit and underground, totaled a record 1.39 million tons worth $3.1 billion in 1997.
Copper mining injected a record $10.4 billion into Arizona’s economy in 1997, one year before the bottom fell out of copper prices, according to the Western Economic Analysis Center in Marana. Economic-impact statistics for 1998 were not available.
“Arizona has become more of an industrialized state,” said Jim McBride, an Arizona State University history professor who is an authority on Arizona mining. “I’m sure there are some who say the ‘C’ for copper should be replaced with ‘C’ for computer. But copper is still a major contributor to the economy of Arizona.”
Arizona was home to a couple of dozen mining companies at the turn of the century. Today there are four major players--Phoenix-based Phelps Dodge Corp., the nation’s largest copper mining company; BHP Copper Inc.; Asarco Inc., and Cyprus Climax Metals Co.
If ever there was a boom-and-bust industry, it’s copper mining.
Arizona copper mines ran full tilt in the early 1920s as production of automobiles, electric appliances and machinery soared, according to mining analyst George F. Leaming.
Mines were idled and thousands of miners were out of work during the Depression, but World War II “created a huge demand for copper,” Leaming said.
Up and Down Industry
The industry experienced scattered recessions in the 1940s, then prospered in the Eisenhower years in the ‘50s and took off again during the Vietnam War era, he said.
The Copper Queen Mine in Bisbee, once the world’s second largest copper mine, closed in 1975 because of steadily declining prices. Copper suffered as inflation soared during the early 1980s, but the industry prospered from 1986 until the Asian financial crisis appeared in 1997, Leaming said.
Copper producers have learned to ride out down periods by cutting costs to the bone, to the point of urging miners to eschew a new pair of gloves for a worn but still usable old pair.
Some analysts believe the Asian economy has bottomed out and is slowly building toward renewed demand for new homes and automobiles. That’s encouraging news to the copper industry, because the average home contains about 400 pounds of copper, and the average auto, 50 pounds.
“The demand will eventually pick up,” Leaming said. “Copper is an energy metal but it’s also a war metal. From what I’ve observed, people are going to keep throwing things at each other, and they’ll be building things.”
Arizona’s copper reserves are sufficient to allow ore to be mined far into the next century, according to Chuck Shipley, president of the Arizona Mining Assn.
And ore bodies that weren’t economical to mine 10 to 15 years ago are feasible today because of new technologies that make extracting ore cheaper and easier, said BHP Copper spokesman Bill Norman.
The Carlotta Copper Co. has applied for federal permits to open the first new, major copper mine in Arizona in 20 years at a site west of Miami. Carrie Schlink is anxiously watching and waiting, hoping one day to trade her work suit for miner’s garb.
“I’m not done with mining,” she said. “I know it better than anything else. I’m more comfortable there.”
