Devil in the details for Steelworkers special session

Simon Cunningham, Flickr CC

Gov. Mark Dayton and Senate DFLers are still seeking a special session to help Steelworkers whose unemployment will run out between now and March. They also seek economic measures to address racial disparities in the state.

As we discussed last week, House Republicans declined to support such a session unless Dayton established support for two controversial projects, the Sandpiper Pipeline and Polymet’s proposed copper-nickel mine near Hoyt Lakes.

This week, Gov. Dayton responded in a letter. The missive reiterates his previously-stated support for Sandpiper and commits not to delay the legal process of environmental and financial review for PolyMet. He declined to support or oppose PolyMet until this legal process has been completed.

House Republicans in the majority have yet to agree to support the session’s goals based on this information. The matter is still being negotiated.

This is a good time to talk about what is going on with unemployment benefits and the miners. You could say that state unemployment benefits are designed to run only for a certain amount of time before they are cut off, and that is true. But the nature of mining unemployment is bedeviling. These mining jobs are considerably better than any other jobs typically available for workers with these skills. Further, just because a mine shuts down for three months or even half a year, they typically reopen (though not always, and maybe not this time).

So it’s not as easy as cutting off these miners’ benefits and having them retrain or take jobs almost as good. The best thing for them, by far, is to get back to work at the mines. The unresolved question is whether there will be as many jobs for these workers as there were at the start of 2015 when this current downturn levels off.

Chances are, probably not.

Yet there are so many workers affected in a very small region that there is no way to absorb the blow with other work.

Because the root cause of these layoffs is international trade, federal benefits are available to these workers if they agree to retraining, but only in certain fields. Already, laid-off workers have become a regular site around the Iron Range community college where I work — most staking out options, not yet enrolling for classes. Yet, beneath it all is this understanding that the instant a worker gets a call back to work, he or she will go.

This is what makes recovering from the these mining busts so difficult. When times are good, no one wants to talk about economic diversification. When times are bad, people’s states of mind are too messed up to plan or think cogently. I had a student a while back who was almost done with a retraining program after he was laid off from Northshore. Northshore called him back and he quit school before finishing. Why not? The mine paid him twice what he would have made in the new field. Now, I presume, he is among the 400-plus workers laid off — again — from Northshore Mining.

So it goes like this. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that until we know the complete long term impact of this mining downturn, there is reason to invest in keeping these skilled workers in the communities and their families secure. Unfortunately, it might be proven later that the best thing for many will be to train for work that might take them to other parts of the state. But we don’t yet know that, and there is no particularly good reason to stall doing something decent for human beings that will likely be done anyway when the session opens in March.

You all know that what I want most is economic diversification. This is unequivocally the long term answer. But until we address the stress and emotions that come from the current economic cycle on the Iron Range we can’t get the people (and community leaders) we need to support a new way forward.