Arizona Daily Star 1999

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Morenci mine to cut 1,550 workers

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Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold announced today it will be cutting almost half the employees at its Morenci mine.

At least 1,550 employees at the operations in east-central Arizona will be out of work by the end of March, Freeport spokesman Richard Peterson said in an email. Most of them will be put on paid leave Feb. 2.

The Morenci operation — one of the biggest copper mines in the United States — employs 3,300 people, so the new layoffs represent 47 percent of the workforce. They come on top of 402 job cuts at Morenci that took place in November.

Freeport-McMoRan was the ninth-biggest employer in Southern Arizona, according to last year's Star 200 survey. But that was during a copper boom that ended in mid-2008 with the price of the commodity plunging by more than 60 percent.