‘We don’t want to lose this mine’: Fear sets in for Iron Range miners as shutdown takes hold

VIRGINIA, MINN. – Water rises inside the cavernous pits of the Minorca Mine here, the pumps removed when the plant was abruptly idled in March.

Iron Range Facebook sites are filled with people selling four-wheelers, RVs and bikes, and “for sale” signs have proliferated across tidy lawns.

The effects are spreading from the latest mine shutdown, the March 20 layoff of 600 workers at Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs mines in Virginia and Hibbing.

Iron Rangers have grown used to shutdowns over the years, but typically they are back to the rust-red pits within a year. This one, locals say, feels different, with more uncertainty, and fear that the layoffs could be indefinite.

When the Minorca mine last idled in 2009, it was owned by ArcelorMittal. Then, there was a return date, said truck shop mechanic Keith Altobelli, and it ceased operations in an orderly way.

“This time it was chaos,” he said of the day people were told to stop working. “They pretty much said we’re not spending any more money, pulled the plug and told everybody ‘Go home.’”

Workers were instructed through their radios to immediately stop digging, dump their loads and turn off the heavy equipment. Many learned their fates soon after from the website of Duluth-based television station WDIO, before it was announced by the company.

They were shocked by the swift reversal, when they had been urged for months to ramp up production to lower costs per ton. Instead of continuing to work for the next two months, as called for in their contract, all but a skeleton crew were told to winterize their areas and be finished well before those 60 days were up.

A surplus of taconite pellets and an auto industry in chaos over President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs hit the Minorca Mine with double blows.

Some miners say high vehicle prices and interest rates are the issues slowing auto sales this year, and that tariffs helped their industry during Trump’s first term. They expect the new tariffs on foreign steel imports — which Trump raised from a 25% increase to 50% last week — will boost the industry over time as companies buy more American steel.

But right now, it’s hurting them, said Al King, president of United Steelworkers Local 6115, which represents Minorca.

“[When] they start running low on the supply chains ... that’s when it will benefit us,” he said. “That’s potentially months, a year down the road.”

And his union ranks are already shrinking.

“I need to try to get people to wait this winter out,” King said. “We don’t want to lose this mine.”

Harold Anderson of Virginia has been a Minorca electrician for nearly two decades. Now, he’s helping a son with roofing jobs, and he’s working on his camper so his son can travel instead.

“I just don’t dare spend money,” Anderson said.

He’s applied for non-mining jobs in the region to “test the waters.” It’s all new to him, he said, because he’s always had stable employment.

Mining jobs, which pay upwards of $125,000 annually with overtime, are among the highest paying and most coveted on the Iron Range. Some joke that miners are “Range rich.” Most will suffer a major pay cut if they stay in the region, unless they find work at another mine.

Union workers were paid in full for 60 days post-shutdown. Unemployment pay, which they can now collect, is about half of typical earnings.

Altobelli, the laid-off truck shop mechanic, and his wife co-own Other Guys Burgers in Virginia and Hibbing. Business is down about 25% since the layoffs, he said, with fewer lunchroom orders or family dinners.

The region is feeling the layoffs, Altobelli said, although it doesn’t yet match the level of poverty felt during the 1980s, after demand for steel plummeted in the 1960s and 1970s.

“All our dads were home, all day long,” he said. “They were splitting up government cheese back in those days. It was a little bit different economy than it is now.”

Now it’s more politically complex, with extended unemployment benefits to advocate for and greater public expectations for help than in the 1980s, said Pete Hyduke, mayor of Hibbing.

What hasn’t changed, he said, are the ripple effects on families, small businesses, schools and the workforce.

Health care is a major industry on the Iron Range, but it’s heavily dependent on miners and their private insurance. Area schools, already slashing budgets amid declining enrollment and state funding issues, could lose more students as families move.

A shutdown “sends shockwaves through our city and region,” Hyduke said. “Our goal and focus is to give people a reason to stay, to live, work and raise their families here.”

In a bipartisan effort, northeast Minnesota lawmakers pushed an extended unemployment bill in the most recent legislative session. Its fate will be decided in the pending special session, but it would extend unemployment benefits to June 2026.

That extension could help keep workers in town, said Sen. Rob Farnsworth, R-Hibbing. He’s hopeful Nashwauk’s Mesabi Metallics will open next year to offer jobs to laid-off miners if the Cliffs shutdown is prolonged.

The downturn highlights the need for new types of mining, said Rep. Cal Warwas, R-Clinton Township.

A third-generation miner who works as a welder and fabricator at U.S. Steel’s Minntac, Warwas was speaking of controversial copper-nickel mining, which opponents fear could bring long-lasting pollution to air and water.

The Iron Range has a minerals-based economy, in the way that agriculture dominates southern reaches of the state, Warwas said, making new mining projects critical to its prosperity.

“We can’t reinvent ourselves,” he said.

Though mining represents just 0.2% of Minnesota jobs, the industry is still the bedrock of the Iron Range and important to the shipping industry in the Twin Ports and nearby Two Harbors.

A 2020 University of Minnesota Duluth study says nearly 9,000 jobs stem from Iron Range mining, nearly half directly, and the industry contributes $4 billion to the state’s economy and $3 billion in labor income and value-added spending.

While Minorca is the smallest of the Iron Range mines at about 2.8 million tons of taconite moved annually, enough of the lower-grade iron ore remains in the ground for about another three decades. U.S. Steel’s nearby mines produce several times that amount annually.

Cleveland-Cliffs president and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said on a May 8 earnings call that Trump’s tariffs on foreign steel were “a necessary action to eliminate unfairly priced competition.” The company blamed excess taconite pellet inventory from last year for the shutdown.

Six of its facilities were shuttered to cut expenses by $300 million, $20 million of it expected from idling Minorca and partly idling the Hibbing Taconite mine. The company lost $483 million in the first quarter.

“The actions taken by the administration are squarely aimed at boosting the production of cars and trucks in the United States using steel produced in the United States,” he said. “However, in the short term, we need to do everything we can to make sure that we remain cost-competitive.”

Adding to the uncertainty, Cleveland-Cliffs’ troubles come as Japan’s Nippon Steel is set to buy U.S. Steel, the other major mining company on the Iron Range.

Mining remains “the engine that drives our economy,” said Larry Cuffe Jr., mayor of Virginia.

When mines are producing less, the taxes they pay on their production goes down, money that’s distributed to area communities.

“I don’t want families to suffer,” Cuffe said. “Hopefully, the Legislature ... I hope they have a heart.”

King said at least a dozen of the 300-plus workers laid off at Minorca are leaving the region, taking families with them.

Mountain Iron resident Missy Salinas and her husband, Roy, have canceled camping trips and visits to family in Iowa.

“We were just living life, and all of a sudden, everything came to a screeching halt,” she said, when Roy, a millwright, was laid off.

Salinas has a small online wellness business to help support the family, but they rely on Roy for the bulk of their income. The family has cut back on extras like dining out, and worry, too, about the rising cost of groceries. Roy could have transferred to a Cleveland-Cliffs’ mine in Michigan, but the couple has a teenage daughter and they didn’t want to move while she was still in high school.

“It’s been hard on him because he feels lost,” Salinas said of her husband. “He’s 56 years old and here he is applying for school, and it’s so humbling.”

She doesn’t see the shutdown as something that will be resolved soon.

“They’re letting the pits fill up with water,” Salinas said. “It actually made me sick. It feels personal.”

Chisholm resident Jon Bird is a crusher with Minorca and a fourth-generation miner. He also has a psychology degree and is licensed to practice as an alcohol and drug counselor.

But mining jobs are the ones that will support a family “for the next 30 years,” said the 34-year-old. “I can’t make this kind of money at any of those jobs.”

His wife, Marissa, just graduated with a registered nursing degree, which will help with finances as she begins to earn more and he stays home with their youngest child.

King, the union president, has been in the role about a year and has been intentional about ensuring members are aware of job-loss resources and mining-related maneuvering at the State Capitol, using YouTube to spread messages.

The 30-year-old single dad of four young kids is trying to navigate his own unemployment as he helps his members. He’s taken a lot of phone calls from members worried about losing a truck or a home, or needing to just talk about their situations.

Most miners realize they are part of a global industry, subject to the whims of giant corporations, King said.

“We’re just collateral damage.”