The Coal Agreement
What threatened to be a serious hitch in the working of the new national conciliation and arbitration machinery for keeping peace in the coal industry occurred in the Northumberland and Cumber- land districts, when.: the miners found themselves held up by the wage agreement of 1940. Under the operation of this agreement the owners' were in a position to refuse to allow a question of increased overtime to be referred to national arbitration. A way out of the difficulty has been found by Lord Greene's Board of Investigation. Where an arbitrator decides that there has been a substantial change in circumstances, district wage agreements may Ir. opened for review by the district reviewing authority on the application of either party ; but they will be referred to the national board if the application requires to be dealt with on a national basis. In effect the 1940 district agreement is to be treated as if it had been made by the national negotiating committee. It seems that in the eves of the miners the owners in Northumberland and Cumberland were making use of an earlier agreement to deprive the workers of advantages which would have come to them under the concilia- tion scheme ; and for this reason the whole scheme became unaccept- able to the men. There was some genuine misunderstanding re- garding the bearing of the new scheme on the 1940 agreement— which, in fact, it did not effect at all—but that has now been cleared up, and a welcome and hopeful spirit of harmony appears to be pervading the industry.
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