To Sin Against Hope by Alfredo Gutierrez

Author:Alfredo Gutierrez
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

The declining fortunes of Phelps Dodge did not go unnoticed on Wall Street. Business Week’s cover on July 26, 1982 announced “Management Crisis at Phelps Dodge.” The accompanying article said of the chairman, George Munroe, that “Munroe is considered a decent, intelligent man. But he is also known to be extremely cautious making hard decisions and has an aversion to hearing bad news.” Munroe was a former professional basketball player with the Boston Celtics, a Rhodes scholar, a graduate of Harvard Law, and the primary instigator of Phelps Dodge’s diversification away from its reliance on copper. That appeared to have been a failed strategy. Though the company moved its headquarters to Phoenix in 1982, Munroe kept his office and residence in New York, along with his board seat on the Metropolitan Museum of Art and on the Council of Foreign Affairs. When he did visit the hinterlands, “company officials treated Munroe’s rare visits to Arizona like a tour of a head of state.” As for visiting the isolated mining communities, “Munroe arrived in the copper towns looking and sounding more like a copper czar than a negotiator seeking to find common cause with the workers.”31 While Chairman Munroe was aloof and lordly, Phelps Dodge’s president, Richard Moolick, was an angry engineer that had come up the company ranks running mining operations, including those at Clifton and Morenci in Arizona. Moolick was mostly angry at unions:

You’re naive if you think it’s good to operate with a union. It’s no way to work for the company, for the employees, or for anyone … Mine Mill was an old and militant union. The first time I sat at a bargaining table there were some card-carrying commies on their side. To me it was an affront to sit across from a goddamned commie. And those people remained in the Steelworkers, too, you know. It was the same crowd.32

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