LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[Correspondents arc requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitaWe length is that of one of our " News of the -Week" paragraphs. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym.—Ed. Tirr SPECTATOR.]
THE TRAGEDY OF COAL
[To the Editor of THE Sealelevroa.] Stu. week in The Spectator an able article by Mr. Geoffrey Crowther on the impending crisis in the coalfields, written from the point of view of the average British citizen as an impartial but desperately anxious spectator, painted the future in terms of unrelieved gloom. " Is there nothing we can do about it ? " he cries, " we who are neither miners nor owners, neither employees nor Trade Unionists, we who me bound by ties of loyalty to neither side ? " He concludes that there is indeed very little that we outsiders can do about it and that therein lies the true tragedy of coal.
Now I do not pretend to be an expert on the coal industry, except in so far as I am an industrialist producer myself in an railed industry—that of electricity. But I take precisely the opposite view to Mr. Crowther's conclusions, while using the same set of data. It seems to me that in the present dispute, when the miners are justifiably demanding a 12s. a week rise on their . present starvation wages of 45s., and the owners' reply with equal justification that on present selling prices the industry cannot afford this 12s. a week rise, the solution to the whole impasse lies not in the hands of the miners or owners at all, but in the common sense and goodwill of the. outside public. The crux of the whole matter is that we, the outside public, the buyers and users of the coal, the industrialists and housewives of Britain, are getting our caml too cheap for the industry to afford a decent living wage to its workers. And the solution of the problem depends precisely on this : are we, though pretending to be impartial spectators and desperately anxious to help, going to adopt an attitude of complete intransigence and scream that the very existence of our industries and our homes depends on the maintenance of coal prices at their present level '? Or are we going to be sensible and just towards our fellow- citizens engaged in the mining industry and afford them a decent living wage ?
There are nearly a million persons employed in the mining industry. They mine 250 million tons of coal a year, of which 200 million is for home consumption and 50,000,000 for export. These near million miners are asking for an extra 12s, each every week in the year : that is, for an extra £30,000,000 a year in wages. Where is this huge sum to come 'from ? I accept Mr. Crowther's estimate that none of the obvious remedies swat as nationalisation, rationalisation, closing down of MIMI- HOHHO pits and concentration on more efficient ones, increased mechanisation, centralised selling, unification of royalties, can give us more than a fraction of the sum towards the £30,000,000 needed, however necessary and overdue these reforms are. Even elimination of those stubborn human stumbling blocks, the owners, and the paying of all mining and merchanting profits into wages, would probably only give us an extra 6d. a week for wages—and the miners are asking for an extra 12s. a week. The coal mining industry, even at its most efficient, can never provide the extra £30,000,000 out of its own resources. Provided that is proved substantially true, there remains only one source from which it can Rome, the con- sumers.
To contend that such a necessary raising of the price of coal is artificial is obviously to beg the question. For so long as an industry, like coal at present, is running at a patently uneco- nomic level, the selling price of its product can only be re- garded as uneconomic and artificial. And not till its selling price is raised sufficiently to cover full costs and wages can it be said to have ceased to be an artificial price and become an economic one. The coal industry today does not cover even that first charge on any business's resources, the payment of adequate wages to its employees. Niebody denies its employees' wages are inadequate. To me, as an ordinary industrialist sel- ling goods and paying wages, there seems to be only one way an industry can pay adequate wages, and that is by raising its sel- ling price sufficiently to cover full costs of production. That means the extra £30,000,000 for miners' wages must for the most part come from an increased price of coal to British con- sumers. It is useless to expect to get a higher price in
competitive world markets for that fifth of our coal pro- duction, or 50 million tons, exported abroad. As we shall probably need to continue its export to pay for our imports of food and raw materials, we shall have to subsidise it by £6,000,000 or a fin of that £30,000,000. The other £24,000,000 must inevitably come from a higher price, say 20 per cent. to 25 per cent. higher, on coal consumed in Great Britain.
For industrialists and domestic consumers to complain loudly that their businesses and their homes will be ruined, and that such a raising of coal prices to an economic level sufficient to cover adequate wages, is a monstrous imposition, seems to me as a fellow industrialist and consumer mere blatant hypocrisy and selfishness. For the nation as a whole to insist on condemning a whole industry of a million persons, with a further 2fr million dependants, and that industry the second greatest in the land, permanently to running at an uneconomic level and paying its employees starvation wages, is both inexcusable and unthinkable. It is also consummate economie folly. For so long as the 3?-; million miners and their dependants remain the poorest and most bitterly depressed section of the community, so long their lack of buying power, in a vicious circle, sterilises the sales of other British industries serving their needs. Whereas the whole £30,000,000 a year extra buying power given them as their just due will come straight back as a £30,000,000 increase of trade to the rest of British industry, for no miner's family, even on the princely sum of 57s. a week, can be hoarders of capital. To put it at its lowest, just generosity to the miners will pay the rest of
us hand over list —Yours faithfully, THOMAS BURNS.
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