Western Federation of Miners and International Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Records on Microfilm

Documents collected by Professor Vernon H. Jensen for his work on the non-ferrous metals industry. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and its successor, the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW) were historically considered the radical wing of the non-ferrous metals miners' unions.

Professor Jensen (Ph.D., Univ. of California, 1939) taught labor economics at the University of Colorado between 1937 and 1945 and was a public panel member of the National War Labor Board during World War II. He was appointed to the faculty of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in 1946, where he remained for the balance of his academic career. He is an authority on collective bargaining and has written extensively on the history of labor relations on the waterfront and in the non-ferrous metals industry. The documents in this collection were gathered primarily for the latter project.

The Western Federation of Miners (WFM) was founded in 1893 by the Butte, Montana Miners' Union (WFM No. 1) and other Western hard rock miners' unions in Utah, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, and South Dakota, in response to two decades of violent opposition by various mining corporations, and the federal, state and local governments.

An independent union until its affiliation with the American Federation of Labor in 1896, the WFM broke away from the A.F. of L. two years later, when it sponsored the Western Labor Union. It formed part of the Industrial Workers of the World from 1905-1907, re-affiliating with the A.F. of L. in 1911, at which time it changed its name to the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (IUMMSW). An early affiliate of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), it was expelled from that organization in 1950. In 1967, the IUMMSW merged with the United Steelworkers of America.