Hearing on Copper Flat Mine, VII: Talking about jobs on Labor Day

Whenever I think about jobs, I remember when I was 14 doing grunt work in construction, and my boss said to me, “Max, if you don’t make me money, why would I hire you.” Good question, but I’ll try to forget that to speak reasonably about jobs at Copper Flat Mine.

Copper Flat Mine was constructed in 1981 and started operations in 1982. There were hundreds of jobs there. Local businesses, like Bartoo’s, had lots of orders. But if you look at 1982 economic statistics in Sierra County, mining jobs ranked 7^th out of 11 employment categories, providing a mere 7% of the jobs in the county. That seems odd.

I knew several men who worked at the mine, mostly as equipment operators, all of them were miners who had their own claims. They told me something of what happened. Let’s fast rewind back to 1982.

One hot day in June, the mine simply turned the workers away. They were laid off. “Laid off” is a nice way to put it. It’s the language of the boss’s PR. From the worker’s perspective, they were all fired. It burned. The miners went back to working their claims. Because it was summer, some workers could find jobs in the fields, in Arrey, Garfield, Hatch, or on farms in the Uvas. Many went on dole. Those who had come to Sierra County with families suffered the most, having to move elsewhere. Management families lost their homes, having to sell at lower prices than the purchase prices of the boom years before mine opening, when everything seemed rosy.

When I came to Hillsboro in the late 1980s, the county’s economy had still not recovered. Lots of houses stood empty. Some owners were still asking boom prices but were willing to sell at a third of asking price.

The economic statistics of 1982 tell a real story, a story of how jobs aren’t jobs if they are temporary. Every job at Copper Flat was also a firing.

So, why did the Copper Flat Mine fire everyone? The bosses (Quintana) say it wasn’t their fault that the price of copper collapsed on the market. That’s life. That is also the story that the present bosses tell. But when the present owners came to town, 15 or so years ago, they wanted a sworn statement from the former mill foreman about how much water was used at Copper Flat Mine. In that statement, the milling engineer said that the mine closed because it couldn’t pay the 20% interest on its bank loan.

That is a very high interest rate, but guess what? That is how much NMCC pays for its money, which was borrowed when general interest rates were near 0%. Actually, NMCC hasn’t paid that interest. The yearly owed interest has just accrued as debt, and the company was in debt almost $100,000,000 at the time it became a private company belonging entirely to its creditor because of its insolvency. Let’s get back to 1982.

In 1982, when copper prices went down, why did Copper Flat Mine close while the copper mines near Silver City stayed operating? One reason would be that those companies were larger, had more money and could hunker down for a while. Another reason is that they could make money with lower copper prices because their mines produced better ore. Copper Flat Mine’s copper ore is only 0.25% copper.

You have to move and process twice as much stuff at Copper Flat Mine than at the mines near Silver. That means Copper Flat Mine costs twice as much to operate per pound of copper produced. It means you use twice as much water to float a pound of copper concentrate. Copper Flat Mine is a marginal mine, and marginal mines can’t operate when copper prices drop.

A job with an insolvent, indebted boss is not very secure. And, when the job comes and goes unpredictably, as at a marginal mine, it’s even less secure. If NMCC says the mine will operate for 12 years, it doesn’t mean your job will run 12 years straight. They mean operating time. In real time, your time, it may last 4 months (as in 1982) before you get burned. There’s been only one continuous mining job at Copper Flat Mine in the last 45 years, and that was occupied by Chet, who every year worked a few hours on each claim that makes up Copper Flat Mine in order to keep the claims alive for the owners.

I can’t help but remember my former boss saying that my job was to make him money. He was right. We taxpayers of New Mexico have given one of the richest families in Australia all the copper, molybdenum, silver, and gold at Copper Flat Mine for free. We taxpayers of New Mexico also gave that wealthy family a million gallons of water to use every day free so it can market those minerals. Now people in Sierra County are clamoring for the opportunity to make more money for that family? Remember: it’s the bosses who want workers to want jobs.