The Coal War

AS SUMMER RECEDES from the British Isles, the six-month old coal strike lumbers on with no end in sight. Perhaps, in another time, winter's approach would have scared Britain's National Coal Board (NCB), the directorate of the state-owned industry, into granting concessions to the striking miners. The sight of dwindling coal in cellar bins along with the first frost on the windows would have prodded management into giving in to calls for higher wages or more paid holidays.

But that time of union preeminence--or at least influence--appears to be gone. Now lan MacGregor, the iron-willed Scottish-American head of the NCB, will simply look elsewhere to fill Britain's coal needs. He has already imported coal from Poland, South Africa and the United States at prices cheaper than those of British coal, even with shipping costs included. Yet, with the odds and much of public opinion against them, the miners strike on.

It was the coal board's hard line proposal to close down twenty pits, thereby eliminating twenty thousand jobs, that precipitated the current strike. The NCB claims that the pits are virtually spent, and therefore inefficient to mine.

Arthur Scargill, the truculent president of the National Union of Miners, has a different opinion. Scargill believes the state should continue to mine the pits until the store of coal is totally exhausted to avoid firing or relocating miners until absolutely necessary. He claims that a 1974 labor-management agreement on coal policy, approved after a lengthy strike that brought down Edward Heath's Conservative government in that same year, contains no mention of pit closings. (MacGregor and his allies have parried this charge with full page newspaper ads quoting statements by both Scargill and the 1974 report which concede that some minus must inevitably close.)

In a country with a strong union tradition, Scargill's strike has won relatively little support. Just this week, British dockers called off a solidarity strike largely because of insufficient support among union members. This tepid response can be traced to a number of factors. First was Scargill's decision to call the strike without a national ballot among union members--earlier ballots had rejected strike calls--prompting many to label the walkout undemocratic. This view has been reinforced by nightly television broadcasts showing violence on the picket lines against miners who continue to work. Then there is the issue of Scargill himself. Rumored to be a member of the Communist Party, Scargill's talk of class warfare has not fallen on overly receptive ears in Thatcher's Britain.

Both these considerations have led many to believe that the strike is little more than a political power play by Scargill. Keeping the miners' 1974 victory over the Conservatives in mind, the union president may hope that a prolonged strike will give rise to doubts about Prime Minister Thatcher's ability to rule, and bring down her government. In a democracy, where people are supposed to choose their governors through the ballot box, a strike is a dubious political tool.

More likely, the real political effects of the strike will be to further damage, the Labour Party, which represents the miners interests more closely than any other in Parliament. The already beleaguered party will be further divided over those who support the strike add those who do not. And Labor will continue to suffer at the polls if the public believes that it is radicals like Scargill who are calling the shots.

Furthermore, many rightly question the call to keep the waning pits open on economic grounds. British coal is already the most heavily subsidized in the Common Market, with the government pumping in the equivalent $2.5 million a day and the industry is grossly uncompetitive. By maintaining uneconomic pits, the Coal Board would have to raise the price on all British produced coal and thus jeopardize an already shrunken market. It would be far wiser to save what is profitable in the industry than to allow the few to drag down the many. Nor can the miners expect, as Scargill has proposed, the British government to buy the coal the market rejects. That would shift the burden of obsolescence on the British taxpayer which is unfair, to say the least.

So it is not hard to see why the miners have not won the widespread support typical of earlier strikes. But when Arthur Scargill says that, above all else, the miners are fighting to preserve their communities--communities that would wither away should the mines close-he deserves an audience. For all his demagoguery and suspect tactics, Scargill is right in his indignation towards a government that does not look out for its own. If there is any legitimate government regulation, surely it must be to tend to those, who must temporarily suffer from economic shifts and prevent progress from becoming a tyranny of the balance sheet.

British unemployment still hovers at 12.5 percent with much higher rates in parts of Scotland and Wales. New industries have not stepped into replace old ones and areas of desolation abound, Perhaps Scargill would be less militant about pit closings if he felt assured that jobs at new mines could be found for those layed off, or that other sectors of the economy could absorb them without too much community disruption and disintegration.

IT IS LIKELY that, in the short run, the British coal strike will have no direct effect on labor relations here. With the threat of Japanese imports and the demise of many traditional industries (not to mention Washington's decidedly anti-union policies), American workers appear sufficiently concerned with job security so as to be more conciliatory than their British counterparts. Furthermore, American unions are beginning to recognize their erosion of their political clout. In addition to dwindling membership, union leaders can no longer be certain that they can deliver the rank and file vote.

But neither is the British coal strike so far removed from American labor-management relations-a fact to which the General Motors workers bear testimony. America may soon face a union militancy comparable to that of the British coal miners if workers feel that they are being left in the wake of economic progress. As in Britain, politicians in the U.S. have done little to help those vast areas where the decline of old industries threatens hundreds of communities.

Certainly some of the industries in the part of the country now known as the Rust Bowl are salvageable; others may not be. But with no industrial policy designed to help these revisable industries and no government or industry commitment to worker retraining programs, blue collar men and women can't help but feel abandoned. Should this feeling become pervasive and nothing be done about the unfortunate human consequences of post-industrialism things might heat up here too.