In preparation for spending the weekend in or near Bisbee, Arizona coming right up, I was doing a little reading on the town. I knew about the infamous Bisbee Deportations of 1917, when the Industrial Workers of the World were organizing in the copper mines there, but I hadn’t read about it in a while.
Despite the IWW’s tremendous success in organizing the miners, 85% of whom went on strike under IWW leadership, the union’s efforts were defeated by the Phelps Dodge corporation and local authorities that served as nothing more than private security for the company. They forced the striking miners onto cattle cars at gunpoint and shipped them hundreds of miles into the desert, in the middle of the summer, leaving 1,200 people in the desert in New Mexico.
There would be no more efforts to organize the miners in Bisbee by the IWW after that. This story may be particularly outrageous, but it is fundamentally representative of how the ruling class has related to the labor movement, in most of the world, for most of the time labor unions have existed.
The rules only exist for the workers, not for the bosses. Applied to Bisbee, you could say, the one who owns the copper makes the rules.
Bisbee, Arizona, 1917
Bisbee, Arizona, 1917
The worst kind of company town anybody’s ever seen
Phelps Dodge controlled everything there
They owned everything in Bisbee, everywhere
It was a town of copper miners, that’s what people did
Worked beneath the ground, lived in the skids
Risking their lives for just enough to survive
It didn’t take long when the Wobblies arrived
They went on strike, all the miners down below
And they were shipped away to New Mexico
Eighty-five percent of the miners had joined in
Mexicans and Anglos, the Croatians and the Finns
Then the dirty sheriff, working with the company
Put them in cattle cars that went five hundred miles from Bisbee
Chorus
Wilson said it was outrageous, but Phelps Dodge never faced
Any consequences for this obvious disgrace
To deport a thousand people beneath the summer heat
They broke the union in Bisbee, it just couldn’t compete
Chorus
