(Part 1 of 2 parts)
It is a recession when you lose your
job. It is a depression when I lose mine. – Old saying.
With the recent loss of over 700
good energy jobs in Gillette, it should be interesting to readers to read about
what happened during the last Wyoming bust at the most mining-oriented town in
the state. Here is that story:
In February
1993, a book was widely quoted around the country, which rated the 100 best
small towns in America.
Lander ranked number 5 and was
prominently mentioned by the author during a visit to the NBC Today Show and the ABC Good Morning America.
What was
remarkable about this was that just ten years earlier, Lander was mired in
possibly the worst depression suffered by any county seat town in Wyoming’s
history.
How Lander
coped with these massive job losses and the steps its civic leaders took might
be a guide for energy-based towns around Wyoming struggling right now with the
loss of hundreds of coal mining jobs this month.
Today, it is
hard to imagine that back in the 1970s, Lander had the biggest mining presence
of any town in the state.
Let’s set the
scene.
The big player
was a U. S. Steel iron ore mine south of Lander. More than 550 miners worked there and most
were members of the United Steelworkers Union.
A few years earlier, those union members participated in what was hailed
as the most generous labor contract ever written. Those families enjoyed incredibly high wages,
courtesy of the union contract, while enjoying the low-cost, outdoorsy Wyoming
lifestyle of Fremont County.
Not long
afterward, the contract was viewed as a fiasco at U. S. Steel headquarters in
Pittsburgh. Their company and other
American steel companies were getting clobbered in the marketplace by cheap,
high-quality steel imported from Japan and Great Britain.
In the face of
this, the company wanted out of that labor contract. To do this, they had to start getting the
union to agree to big concessions. Where
could they start with such a plan?
Why not little
Lander, Wyoming, where a statewide union presence was a minority position and
the workers could be persuaded to give in?
Industry leaders thought they could start a domino effect with other
union employees around the country.
As
editor-publisher of the Lander newspaper, I knew the iron mine wouldn’t last
forever. There was more than ten years
of high quality taconite ore were still available when the company started
making noises about shutting down.
Despite
tremendous efforts by state and local officials to convince them to make
concessions, the union members wouldn’t budge.
Soon the mine cut back to half its employees. Still, the union wouldn’t
budge. Finally, the company announced the mine was closing and immediately sold
off all materials to a salvage company.
It happened so
quickly. The mine was closed. Those 550
jobs were gone.
Then the other
shoe dropped.
In the early 1980s, Fremont County
enjoyed a tremendous boom when processed uranium ore called yellowcake soared
to record prices of $50 per pound. Mines
were created overnight in the Jeffrey City area east of Lander and the Gas
Hills area east of Riverton. More than 2,000 men and women were working in
those mines and hundreds of other people were working for support companies.
Property tax
valuations soared. Home values went up one and half percent per month for over
two years.
Life was good.
It all came
crashing down fast. When yellowcake prices soared, the utility companies that
owned the nuclear reactors went to Congress and asked for restrictions to be
removed on the importation of uranium from other countries.
America
immediately exported all those uranium jobs to Australia, Canada, and Russia. Soon, yellowcake was a glut on the
world market and prices dropped under $10 per pound.
Towns like
Jeffrey City, which had grown to 4,000 people with its own high school plus a
chamber of commerce, fire department and even its own Lions Club, started to
lose people.
I even started
a newspaper in Jeffrey City, which lasted from 1978 to 1985. Today, the
population of Jeffrey City is measured in the dozens.
Lander business
leaders had been pretty smug, including this writer. I had written that Lander was bulletproof
when it came to the boom-bust mineral cycles that had plagued other parts of
the state over the decades.
Boy was I wrong.
(Next week:
How Lander turned itself around in ten years).
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