LESSONS FROM GRIMETHORPE
THE strike at Grimethorpe Colliery carries with it a number of hard but useful lessons. The general public, faced with the spec- tacle of 400,000 tons of coal already lost in a dispute directly concerning 132 men, may be less anxious to learn lessons than to teach them at this moment, but the fact remains that no purpose will be served by that anger which is the most common reaction to this waste of time, labour and coal. The very fact that it is pos- sible for this single dispute to spread, in the course of a month, from one coal face over half the Yorkshire field and bring some sopoo miners in so pits to a standstill, shows how inadequate are the ordinary categories of reason to an understanding of this ques- tion, even when reason is not disturbed by indignation. The average man who does a day's work, who grasps, however imperfectly, the seriousness of his country's plight, and who remembers that 400,000 tons of coal would have been enough to avert the disastrous stoppage of last February, will probably conclude that, however short we may be of miners, the industry had best rid itself at once of these malcontents—and he will be right. But there is no reason to expect that such action would settle the strike, much less the broader questions which it poses on labour organisation, mechanisa- tion, mine management, the effectiveness of the National Union of Mineworkers, and the working of the Coal Board.
These are questions which cannot be answered in a hurry, but an examination of them is not unfruitful. There is, first of all, the revelation of the attitude of many of the Grimethorpe miners to the problem of mine management. It contains an element of syndi- calism, of a desire of the Grimethorpe men to run their own pit. It made itself felt in their objection to the decision that a longer stint should-be worked on the Melton Field seam because that decision was finally made by a committee of two officials of the Board and two of the union, none of them Grimethorpe men. The fact that the pit conciliation committee had failed to settle the dispute, and that clause it of the five-day week agreement specifically lays down the proper procedure made no difference. Nor did last week's attempt to appease the strikers by re-submitting the question to a special committee of three men, two of whom were working miners. But this irrational desire for extreme local autonomy cannot be ignored. It is found in more or less inarticulate form in other pits and other fields, and it increasingly tends to express itself in negative form in a growing antagonism to the National Coal Board and all its works. It is one more piece of evidence, if evidence is still needed, not only of the failure of the public to understand the miners but of the miners to understand the public. It must be realised that the bridging of this gap is a strictly practical problem and that the Grimethorpe disaster is a direct consequence of previous failures to bridge it. The syndicalist aspiration is nonstnse, and the miners must be made to see it for what it is. The mines are not for the niiners but for the whole people, and the right of the people to have its property well managed is at stake now. The wider view of management raises the second main issue on which there must be speedy action, and at the same time draws attention to one means of bridging the gap between the miners and the public. The dispute has drawn attention sharply to defects in the National Coal Board and in the National Union of Mine- workers. Neither comes out of this affair particularly well. In the case of the Board it would have been surprising had it been other- wise. Nationalisation has been working only for eight months, and its administrative machinery could hardly have been perfected in that time. There will clearly have to be changes, many of them in the direction of decentralisation. The vertical division of the Board's activities in accordance with function has not yet been fully adjusted to local needs. The Board has something to learn in this respect, and there is no reason to believe that it will fail to learn it. But more prompt attention to local factors might have prevented' the present dispute from spreading, dragging other pits into a matter which did not concern them, and ultimately involving the Union, the Board, and the Government.
If the Coal Board has something to learn, the N.U.M. has even more. It is by no means certain that every move since the dispute began on August rith has been made with the minimum of delay. The pronouncement of the national executive committee from Southport on September 3rd was a pompous utterance, presumably intended to frighten the strikers, but more likely to have the opposite effect. There is clearly little love for Mr. Will Lawther, the Presi- dent of the Union. As to its General Secretary, the Communist Mr. Arthur Homer, he would carry more conviction both with the miners and the public if he would make it clear just how much increased production he expects to get from harder work and how much from drafting in large numbers of new recruits. The lesson, of which there have been more than enough examples lately, of the inefficiency and cumbersomeness of union organisation and its remoteness from local realities needs to be thoroughly learned.
One institution after another, one policy after another, have been put to the test at Grimethorpe. The results must be noted and applied. The argument of the men that performance at the pit compares well with that of others, and that they should therefore not be singled out to work a longer stint, is crucial. If the Reid Report means anything, and if the policy of reorganisation and concentration means anything, then it is precisely in the good pits that the greatest effort must be made, with the aid of every mechanical device which can be introduced to assist output. The Coal Board has already acted elsewhere upon this principle, and agreements have been made for the increase of tasks in one-third of the Yorkshire pits without any trouble. Resistance to such action could lead to the breakdown of nationalisation itself. None of the Government's nationalisation schemes had a fairer start than this one, which had the assent of all parties. But it was not universally believed that it would succeed automatic- ally. Whether it succeeds depends on the willingness of the miners to co-operate in the policy of concentration on the most profitable seams, and if it fails the resistance to other and less justifiable nationalisation projects will stiffen. The appeal to the miners is perfectly genuine whether it is based on altruism or mere party politics.
Yet the appeal has not succeeded. The Grimethorpe strike began on August rrth, the day following the Prime Minister's last broad- cast appeal for a united national effort. It began to spread to other pits on August 27th, the day of the announcement of the cuts intended to redress the dollar balance—cuts in part due to the failure of British coal production. Neither of these events consti- tuted a particularly stirring appeal, but both of them had an obvious moral. Again, although coal stocks at the end of August were some 3,000,000 tons higher this year than last, the danger of another breakdown this winter is perfectly real, quite apart from the depress- ing effect of low coal production on industrial enterprise in general. And at the very time when the first industries were going on short time for lack of fuel, some of the Grimethorpe miners expressed their willingness to remain out until Christmas—a threat which small savings, income tax refunds and public assistance of various kinds could enable them to keep- What lesson is there to be drawn from this but the elementary lesson of decent social con- duct which the miners do not appear to have learned? There is a limit to the allowances which can be made for the hardness of the miner's lot. Those newspaper reporters who have gone down to Grimethorpe and taken the miners rather condescendingly to their bosoms appear to have been so surprised to find that miners are, human beings—if anything rather more impressive and colourful human beings than the general run—that they will forgive them anything. But the other qualities these same Grimethorpe miners have displayed also deserve to be recognised for what they are— ignorance, parochialism, idleness. irresponsibility and poverty of public spirit. There is no forgiveness for these things except through hard work in the job they have chosen and a genuine desire to realise that the national interest is broader than a seven yard stint.
In fact most of the lessons have to be learned by the miners themselves. But the public at large will have failed to profit by this very expensive example if it does not call immediately for an overhaul of the machinery of the Coal Board, with a greater measure of decentralisation ; for guarantees that if the trade unions are to retain their privileged position they must justify it by becoming much quicker and more forceful in their handling of disputes ; and for an immediate campaign, not only to instruct the public in the elements of mining as the magazine Coal attempts to do, but to educate those miners who need it in the elements of their duty as public servants.
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