In doing so, unlike the rest of the copper industry, Phelps Dodge continued to operate and pay its workers and reduce its production by 20%.
Company chairman George B. Munroe decided to hold a series of "town hall meetings" to talk directly to the workers.
Although copper prices remained stagnant throughout 1982, Phelps Dodge ended its shutdown, calling more than half the work force back about five months after Munroe's visits.
With no expectation of higher copper prices for years to come, management concluded that to survive, Phelps Dodge needed a long-term plan to reduce labor costs.
The union leadership considered that it had accommodated the suffering copper industry by agreeing to no wage increases for three years, except for the usual cost-of-living adjustments.
[5] In April 1983, Phelps Dodge began negotiating with a coalition of its 13 labor unions, led by the United Steel Workers.
The unions believed that to give in to Phelps Dodge would destroy the system of uniform wages in the copper industry, which had served them so well for years.
In June, both Magma and ASARCO agreed to contracts on the pattern set by Kennecott, which left Phelps Dodge the only holdout.
[6] Negotiations between Phelps Dodge and the unions failed to reach an agreement, and a strike began on midnight of July 30, including workers from Morenci, Ajo, Clifton, and Douglas, Arizona.
The Greenlee County Board of Supervisors imposed a 9 pm to 6 am curfew, but the Clifton City Council instructed its police not to enforce it.
At the El Paso smelter, a group of strikers incapacitated a police dog by beating it with steel rebar, baseball bats, and two-by-fours.
[8] In August, miners were subject to undercover surveillance by the Arizona Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency to identify the strikers engaged in violence.
The company took out large employment ads for new workers in the Tucson and Phoenix newspapers and advertised that the average annual wage for its employees was $26,200, plus what it calculated as $10,500 in benefits.
On August 8, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt flew to Morenci and got Phelps Dodge to agree on a ten-day freeze on hiring replacement workers.
Arizona state police officers told Phelps Dodge managers that an attack appeared imminent and that they would not be able to protect the plant or those inside it.
In a scene that writer Jonathan Rosenblum likened to an Old West showdown, as both sides watched, two Phelps Dodge managers walked out the gate and onto the middle of US Highway 191 (all traffic had been rerouted).
[14] On August 15, despite a request from Governor Babbitt to hold off, Phelps Dodge mailed eviction notices to miners fired for misconduct on the picket line.
[5] On August 17, despite his dislike of Phelps Dodge, Babbitt decided that he had a duty to prevent violence when the mines and mills reopened.
The action drew bitter criticism from union supporters, who accused Babbitt of being in the “back pocket” of Phelps Dodge.
He responded that he was “in the back pocket of the American judicial system.”[15] Under heavy military and police protection, the Morenci mine and plant reopened on August 20 without incident, and the company again began hiring replacement workers.
The result was the largest mass decertification in US history: 35 locals of 13 different unions representing Phelps Dodge workers were decertified in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
[5] After a series of confrontations and controversies, the strike officially ended on February 19, 1986, when the National Labor Relations Board rejected appeals from the unions attempting to halt decertification.
The Economics of Labor Markets and The Transformation of American Industrial Relations singled out the Arizona strike as the start of overt company strikebreaking in the 1980s.