Mining Industry Needs New Motivation

Keewatin, Minn. It's quiet today outside the gates of the KeeTac taconite plant in Keewatin. There should be furnaces pouring exhaust out of a row of stacks there. There should be trucks rumbling in the background, and maybe from here you could hear the roar of the rock grinding and crushing from the taconite building, but nothing today. This plant is not likely to reopen until this recession lets up.

"They've talked about going back in April, or March for repairs and stuff," Wilson said. "But I don't know, with the way the economy's going if that's going to happen or not. The economy's going to dictate everything, I think."

About half KeeTac's workforce is on furlough; the others have temporary jobs at another taconite plant in Mountain Iron.

When KeeTac was open, Cliff Toby was fixing mining shovels and trucks. Now, he's fielding calls in the union hall, where the number of calls from worried workers is on the rise.

"I think we're kind of right at the point where it's really starting to sink in pretty heavy," Toby said.

The people laid off in Keewatin get six months of unemployment, but a third of that has already been used up. The economic fallout is not as bad here as it was in the 1980s, when two taconite companies closed altogether. But now, Toby said the industry feels more volatile because of globalization.

"This could be a lot worse than the 80s depending on what happens with the economy," he said. "I don't think in the 80s we had nearly the pressure on our economy from the global economy that you have now."

Toby's counting on the stimulus package in Congress, which could directly stimulate the taconite industry for steel in bridges and steel re-bar in new roads.

"I'm not an economist or anything like that. I'm just a miner on the Iron Range," Toby said. "But, I mean, obviously we're all hoping that this is going to help our situations. We all want to work and we all want things turned back around again."

Taconite mining has always been an up and down business on the Iron Range. John Rebrovich, the Steelworkers Sub-District Director in Eveleth, was surprised how quickly things went downhill.

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by: nicole

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