Gold Country
IN THE FINAL DAYS OF 2019, Ches Carney noticed something strange on the bulletin boards at the northern Nevada gold mines where he had worked for nearly three decades. Stores in the nearby town of Elko were playing holiday music, but Carney was upset: The labor union documents, normally posted to bulletin boards, had disappeared.
As a union steward for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 3, he advocated for his co-workers in disputes with the company. Near the end of the year, the name on Carney’s paycheck changed from Newmont, one of the world’s largest metal miners and an operator of several unionized mines in the area, to something different: Nevada Gold Mines. When Carney confronted a supervisor about the missing union documents, he said he was essentially told that the union was no more and to get over it. The union, which first organized Newmont workers in 1965, negotiated a new contract for about 1,300 production and maintenance workers in early 2019. But by the end of that year, management stopped recognizing it. There was a new boss in town.
Carney, now 66, did a bit of everything as a process maintenance technician — welding, fabrication, examining grease bearings and fixing crushers — as part of a team of four working across a 25-mile area that sits atop a geologic formation known as the Carlin Trend. The Carlin Trend was created by upsurges of magma that left sediment rich with metal deposits near the earth’s surface. Today, this part of northern Nevada is one of the world’s largest gold-mining regions, the spine of the local economy. Its history includes a decades-long rivalry between two of the largest mining companies in the world: Newmont, Carney’s former employer, and Barrick Gold Corp. In the months before Carney’s paychecks changed, the negotiations that led to the creation of Nevada Gold Mines would reshape not only the regional economy, but potentially the entire global gold industry. Barrick and Newmont decided to combine nearly all their Nevada mines and water rights into a single newly formed company. Barrick walked away with a controlling stake in Nevada Gold Mines and now calls most of the shots, largely making management decisions and setting the terms of employment.
Right before Christmas, roughly six months after the two companies formally merged their Nevada operations, one of Carney’s Newmont bosses told him he had to sign a new employment agreement with Nevada Gold Mines. His “new job” offered new rules, different benefits — and effectively no more union. The date of his firing and rehiring, he said, was just before the holidays. “It was a total surprise,” he recalled. “Unexpected.”
After the companies combined their Nevada operations, Carney became an at-will employee, suddenly vulnerable to being terminated for any reason. In a subsequent court filing that accused Nevada Gold Mines of failing to recognize the union, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor law, noted that the new company’s actions “left many employees feeling terrified and betrayed.”
The consequences of Barrick and Newmont’s deal rippled through the mines, the local economy that depends on them, and the Western Shoshone, Paiute and Goshute tribes, whose unceded ancestral homeland is where much of the mining takes place. In Nevada, the fates of many people and communities are entangled with the gold industry. The merger meant that one megacompany was in charge of Barrick, running what the company boasts is the world’s largest gold-mining complex.
Carney left the company in April of last year, a few months before his planned retirement.
