LANSING, Mich. (WZMQ) — Long before Labor Day became a federal holiday marked with cookouts and parades, workers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula were striking, organizing, and sometimes dying for basic protections most people take for granted today.
Adam Saari has spent the last 19 years representing tradespeople in the region, first with what was then Bricklayers Local 6, now merged into a statewide Local 2. He says the roots of organized labor here go back further than most people realize, tracing directly to the region’s 19th-century mining boom.
“In the 1840s, mining became a boom after William Burt came up here and discovered iron ore, and there were deposits of copper and other things that were seen,” Saari said. “Most of the unions here are traditionally based upon the mining industry. This is something that goes way back to the very beginning.”
Saari said that early mining economy left workers with little power. Many were paid not in cash but in credit at company-owned stores, and workers who pushed back risked losing their company-owned housing.
“You didn’t get paid money,” Saari said. “So you got credit from the company store. And if you ever wanted to do better for yourself, many times you’d be kicked out of your house and have to go live in a camp somewhere in the woods.”
That imbalance came to a head more than once. An 1895 walkout by Ishpeming miners ended without the company recognizing their union. Nearly two decades later, the Copper Country strike of 1913 turned deadly when 73 people, 59 of them children, were crushed to death during a strikers’ Christmas party at Calumet’s Italian Hall after someone falsely shouted “fire.”
“A lot of the people ended up leaving after these bloody wars,” Saari said. “They didn’t stick around for a union. They just said, heck with this, I’m going somewhere where they do have unions.”
It took the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, to give U.P. workers firmer legal footing to organize. Copper country mines were unionized in 1939, and in 1946, nearly 3,000 iron miners on the Marquette Range walked off the job for four months before Cleveland-Cliffs recognized the Steelworkers union. Saari said even a celebrity showed up to support that strike.
“There was a man named Paul Robeson that was a very famous singer,” Saari said. “The strikers all said, we need to go talk to Paul. He said he’d happily strike with the strikers, and he walked around, he built morale.”
Women played a role in that same era. In 1949, workers at the Gossard garment factory in Ishpeming, most of them women, struck for 16 weeks and won.
Union strength in the region began to erode decades later, Saari said, pointing to the North American Free Trade Agreement as a turning point.
“The NAFTA treaty really hurt the Upper Peninsula,” Saari said. “You saw mines being closed, including the mine over in White Pine, which completely devastated Ontonagan.”
Modern mines also require fewer workers than they once did, Saari said, even when production stays high.
“The mines are larger now than they used to be. They’re a bigger scope, they’re mechanized,” Saari said. “It’s not that there’s less ore being produced, it’s just that there’s different ways of producing it that require less people.”
Saari said rebuilding a union workforce in the U.P. now depends on keeping younger residents in the region as projects like the proposed Copperwood copper mine and a large investment at the Escanaba paper mill move forward. He pointed to a recent example closer to home: journalists at a Marquette news station voted to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and have since ratified their first contract.
“Anybody at any time can form their own union,” Saari said. “I don’t need to show up to your job for you to start a union. All you have to do is declare that you want to have a union and sign cards.”
