COEUR d’ALENE — The Silver Valley isn’t going to find a gift-wrapped strike settlement under its Christmas tree.

Just as they have since the strike began in March, Coeur d’Alene-based Hecla Mining Company and United Steelworkers Union (USW) local 5114 have failed to break through to resolution.

“We have not made progress in the negotiations since mid-October, in spite of several meetings and inclusion of a federal mediator,” Luke Russell said Thursday. Russell is Hecla’s vice president of external affairs. “Hecla feels the talks are deadlocked.”

David Roose, USW 5114 unit chairman, countered: “The latest proposal they gave us is basically the exact same proposal they gave us back in March. It has become very obvious throughout the course of these negotiations of this strike that Luke Russell is being very poorly misinformed.”

The back and forth accusations have accelerated of late, leading to a Hecla letter Wednesday sent directly to striking rank-and-file miners to refute what company officials say is misinformation from the union. The letter calls for a secret-ballot vote to settle the dispute.

Meantime, the strike has dealt an economic blow to the Silver Valley, where roughly 250 union members had been working the Lucky Friday Mine in Mullan. With pay and benefits, that’s 250 six-figure incomes missing from the local economy for the past nine months.

Hecla officials lament the lost production and negative impact on valley communities but say the strike has not crippled the company. Far from it.

“The three operating mines have had very good years and our cash position is stronger now than it was in 2016,” said Russell. “So while we did not have the production from Lucky Friday in ounces of silver, the company overall has performed well.”

In addition to Lucky Friday, Hecla operates mines in Alaska, Canada and Mexico. Greens Creek Mine on Alaska’s Admiralty Island produced 9.6 million ounces of silver in 2016. San Sebastian Mine in Durango, Mexico, produced 4.2 million ounces of silver last year, while Lucky Friday produced 3.6 million ounces of silver in 2016. The company’s Casa Berardi Mine in La Sarre, Quebec, produced 145,975 ounces of gold last year. Hecla projected increased production at all three operating mines in 2017.

Hecla and union negotiators have met 21 times since the strike began. Its letter to hourly workers Wednesday made it clear that from their perspective, union officials are lying to the others.

“... the Union has misled the labor force by stating the terms offered by the company ‘have not changed’ since the strike began,” the letter states. “This is simply not true.”

The letter lists several areas where Hecla has changed its position and reached agreement with the union:

- To increase call-out pay

- To increase weekly pay for short-term disability

- To increase vacation time awarded each year

- To increase the value of vacation time awarded

The union has stuck with a drumbeat of telling its members Hecla has been inflexible, Russell said Thursday.

“That has been a consistent theme in the union’s Facebook messages,” he told The Press. “Our letter is an effort to set the record straight as to how the company has modified its position throughout the negotiations.”

The letter further says that the job bidding/job posting process used by the union at Lucky Friday was identified in late November by a mediator as “the core issue on which the labor dispute is based.” According to the letter, the mediator asked Hecla to drop its proposal and accept a system used now at another USW-represented mine. According to the letter, Hecla agreed — and the union “promptly rejected the idea.”

“Every progression system we have offered, they have rejected,” Russell told The Press. “They maintain that the senior miners be able to determine where and with whom they work.”

Roose, the USW spokesman, said the union had presented a proposal to the company in October that was “a very, very well crafted hybrid,” taking Hecla’s progression system idea and blending it with the current bid system. He said the company shot down that proposal.

“What Hecla is proposing is ‘the more you learn, the higher rate of pay you get’ and we are all for that,” Roose said. He added that the sticking point for the union is maintaining seniority rights.

Russell and other Hecla officials say the back-and-forth isn’t productive, which is why they’re recommending the issue go directly to union members via a true secret-ballot vote.

“We believe that they should allow workers to vote their conscience without intimidation,” he said. “Then we think we can get an objective outcome.”

Roose said the votes are always done by secret ballot.

“What he wants us to do is to set it up so each individual person votes on a ballot off by themselves where they can’t be influenced by peers or whatever,” Roose said. “The first two votes that we took that were unanimous...both those votes were by secret ballot. The people voting were well shielded from anybody from any outside influence. We all made sure that we had a little table set up off in a corner. When you came in, you signed your name, got your ballot, and went off to this little table and marked the ballot. We made sure that it was only one person at a time and no one was around them when they voted.”

Russell insists that intimidation is part of the union’s ongoing practice, and that it must be eliminated for an accurate vote to occur.

Even then, the vote would be predicated upon accurate information getting into the miners’ hands.

That’s why company officials sent copies of the complete, up-to-the-minute contract proposal directly to its hourly workers and posted it on www.hecla-mining.com, he said — so the workers can see for themselves what Hecla is offering.