Wyoming trona workers demonstrate amid pending layoffs: ‘Lives are at risk here’

Trona workers and their spouses, children and more than 100 community members protested at the break of dawn Monday to show support for 350 WE Soda employees facing layoffs. “Lives are at risk here,” a union representative told WyoFile.

“What we would like to see is the mines stay open,” United Steelworkers Local 13214 President Marshal Cummings said. “And if we’re going to go to solution [mining] that we do it in slow waves through attrition so that it doesn’t completely demolish the community.” 

London-based WE Soda announced Wednesday it will convert its Westvaco underground mining operation to in-situ solution recovery, a less labor-intensive drill-and-pump method that, over the two-year transition, will result in a 41% workforce reduction. The shift is necessary, the company says, due to crushing global market forces driven by a flood of cheaper soda ash — the product derived from trona — from China.

The operational shift will also reduce soda ash output as WE Soda strategically pulls back from the global market to focus on customers in North America, it said. Soda ash is used in glass manufacturing, in cleaning products and in water treatment, among other things.

Layoffs are expected to begin in January and continue over a two-year period, the company said.

The company appears willing to cede Wyoming’s 14% of the global soda ash market, Cummings said, at the expense of a workforce that drives the economy in southwest Wyoming. The union is also pressuring Wyoming’s congressional delegation to take action, he added.

“I hope that they understand that lives are at risk here,” Cummings said. “And this is so much more than just a paycheck, because people’s futures are shattered — on a scale that Wyoming hasn’t seen very often.”

The demonstration was timed to show support to fellow workers on their way to work a shift at the Westvaco operations. Protesters lined a frontage road leading to the mine, lit a burn barrel for warmth and chanted “union strong.”

One child was pictured holding a sign that said, “I don’t know what a ‘layoff’ is, I just know my daddy is sad.”

“I think it was 21 degrees [Fahrenheit],” said Stan Blake, a former Wyoming legislator and Green River mayor-elect. “We wanted to show the people going in on the buses that, you know, we’re there, we’re willing to help out.”

“This is a gut punch,” Blake added. “I’d even call it a sucker punch because it came out of nowhere, as far as I know.”

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