TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE COAL STRIKE CRISIS.
ON Friday the miners of the United Kingdom came out on strike. We have told in our leading paragraphs how the negotiations failed, what are the proposals of the Government, and what are the means by which they intend if necessary to enforce them on the mine owners—the men are admittedly out of the reach of legislation. We shall not repeat the story here, but shall attempt to set forth some of the lessons of the crisis— lessons which are quite as urgent if the strike only lasts for "a long week-end" as if it holds the nation in its grasp for a. month.
The demands of the miners have thrown the whole country into confusion. Why is this ? Because the miners, by refusing to hew coal, have the power to throw the vast majority of the workers in the nation out of work, The reason why they have the power to do this, and to do it immediately, is due to two facts : (1) That all industry now depends upon machinery, and that machinery is operated by coal. (2) That, speaking generally, no manu- facturers or other traders keep sufficient coal in store to run their machinery for more than a few days. Unless coal is won daily in the pits the machinery throughout the country must come to a stop. This places the miner in a position of extraordinary power, and he has become conscious of his power. He can, as it were, produce a general strike without obtaining what has always proved impossible—the assent of all the workers. He can make them cease work by depriving them of the power to work. It is useless to call the miners names because of those facts. To do so would merely be to increase their sense of power. Unrestrained power always goes to men's heads and tends to make them cruel and arbitrary, whether they be masters or men. The important thing is to find how to restrain their power without interference with their in- dividual liberty, or rather to produce that balance of power which is the necessary condition of welfare in a civilized community. We need hardly say that any thought of compelling the miners to work if they do not want to work must be absolutely abandoned. The proper way to restrain their power is for every industry which needs coal to have a sufficient store in hand to enable it to work, even if a strike takes place and its supplies are cut off. The miners have not now; and are never likely to have, funds large enough to allow them to leave off work for more than six or seven weeks. That being so, if the industries of the country have made proper provision against a possible stoppage of the mines, the pistols which the miners are now holding to our heads would be automatically knocked out of their hands.
No doubt there would be a certain trouble and expense for manufacturers in always having a couple of months' supply of coal in hand ; but that is a charge upon their industry and their profits which, in our opinion, they are bound to face, and ought to have faced long ago, instead of acting on the assumption that the machinery of the mines, human and material, would always continue to run, and coal would always be drawn to the surface. We know that coal tends to deteriorate by being stored, but no one can pretend that deterioration to any important extent takes place in two months. Again, we are aware that many factories situated in large towns have not got and perhaps could not obtain ground on which to store coal. In that case they should put up storing places as near as possible to their works, or else make arrange- ments with middlemen whose business it would be to store coal for their customers. That is the first lesson to be drawn from the coal strike. The balance of power in the industrial world must be maintained through thrifty fore- sight on the part of the manufacturers. To repeat our- selves, no manufacturer should feel insured against the legitimate risks of his business unless he has at least two months' coal supply in hand. If that rule were general the miners of Great Britain would not be able to hold up the whole industry of the country because they happen to have given way to the temptation to use the power of which they have suddenly become conscious. The united miners are monopolists, but the proper way to deal with monopolists is not to rage against them or to legislate against them, but to defeat them by counter-organizations and by adequate preparation. Monopolies tackled in this way soon collapse. There has hitherto been too much easy optimism among our manufacturers, too great a trust that so many thousand tons of coal are certain to be thrown up the shafts of the mines every day of the week, just as if they were automatic volcanoes.
It need hardly be said that this is not the only lesson to be drawn from the coal crisis, though it is the lesson which chiefly concerns outsiders. Inside the coal industry the first lesson is that the mine owners should not bear with economic inconveniences till they fester into economic crimes. It has become obvious in the course of the present controversy that the men have substantial grievances in the matter of abnormal places—grievances which could and ought to have been put right long ago. No doubt those grievances are not the real cause of the strike, but they are instruments in the hands of the men which ought not to have been left for them to seize hold of. On economic no less than on moral grounds the mine owners ought to have made sure that there were no men in their employ who did not have it in their power, owing to physical con- ditions, to obtain a fair share in the wages bill of the colliery. Another lesson of the strike is that the mine owners ought to do their best to devise machinery for applying profit-sharing to the mines. There is good ground for believing that profit-sharing would prove a most useful antiseptic. No doubt piecework is in a. certain sense profit-sharing, but one would like to see such profit-sharing made more visible to the men under a regular bonus system ; and, further, one would like to see representatives of the men on the board of directors, as in the case of the South Metropolitan Gas Company. The lesson for the Legislature is perhaps the most patent lesson of all. There seems to be a. very general agreement that the Eight Hours Bill and the sense of malaise which it caused in the mines have played no small part in producing the present crisis. No doubt it was demanded by the men, but nevertheless it has in its results irritated rather than pleased them. Like so many other interferences with freedom of exchange, it has brought not peace but a sword to the lot of the worker.
The final lesson of the crisis is one which will not be appreciated or understood till the battle is over. Yet, nevertheless, it is the most pertinent of all. It is that, strike or no strike, the miners in the end will only be able to obtain the wages which the economic conditions allow, and no more. You may enact a fixed wage for miners, or the workers in an industry may in special circumstances extort the promise of higher wages from their employers, but if those wages are economically impossible, that is, if they destroy the profit of an industry, they cannot last. You may drive out economics for a short time with the pitchfork of a strike, but they never fail to return. A. moment's consideration will prove this. But, it may be said, if wages are so high as to take sway the employer's profits under existing conditions, all he has got to do is to raise the prices of his commodity. People who argue thus always imagine that demand is a fixed quantity, whereas there may be a brisk demand for a commodity at sixpence a, pound and only half the demand if the price goes to sevenpence. But if the demand is thus cut down, the manufactured product must go down, too. Nobody will make things which he cannot sell. But if the product goes down, so must the amount of work to be done, and so also the number of workers employed, or else the hours worked. and paid for. In other words, reduced demand means fewer workmen employed ; or, if the same number as before, then at less wages. But how can the workers benefit by conditions like these ? It will be said, perhaps, that the increased wages can be got out of the present in- ordinate profits of the industry. Alas ! inordinate profits, when looked into in detail, afford very little consolation to the workers. As Sir Hugh Bell showed in his letter in Wednesday's Times on the coal industry, cutting down a dividend of, say, ten per cent. to one of five per cent, would not afford extra pay to the miners, while in the majority of cases what was apparently only a very slight increase in wages would make profits disappear altogether. Generally speaking, competition among the employers has brought down profits to a very moderate figure.
But, it is finally urged, that is no answer to the workers. They must have an adequate wage even if profit is eaten up altogether. From the moral point of view we agree. If it were possible one would be perfectly willing to admit that adequate wages ought to be paid even if the he is fall. But, say the advocates of the men, the capital s there, locked up in the industry, and cannot run away, and therefore it is idle to tell us that the capitalist cannot be sweated. He can be and ought to be. Unfortunately those who argue thus miss the essential point of modern industry, which is that to carry on any big business fresh capital must be brought in every year, or the business will soon die of inanition. In many businesses the capital has in effect to be renewed. every ten years. The mechanism of renewal consists in building up a large reserve fund or writing off so much for depreciation every year. But in i truth this s merely the introduction of new capital pro- vided by the old shareholders to whom the profits belong. Now does any one suppose that they will be content to carry on this system when it is obvious to them that it means throwing good money after bad ? If once it is made clear that capital is not to be paid its market wage, but some arbitrary wage forced upon it by legislation or combination, the renewal capital will not be forthcoming, and the industry must die of exhaustion. That is the reason why you cannot say that the capitalist shall and must be content with less or even no profit in order to give the workers a better share of an industry. And that is what we mean when we say that, do what you will, neither the miners nor any other body of workers can ever obtain a higher wage than the economic conditions allow, This, though it may sound like it, is in reality no counsel of despair. If we allow economic conditions fair play, and do not destroy wealth by checking exchanges, in the end the worker will find that his share will increase while that of capital will decrease. But this must be a slow growth from deep and unseen roots and cannot be attained by violent means. The laws of exchange are very simple, but they cannot be altered or successfully stopped by human action. That is why half and half Socialism is bound to prove fruitless. We must either exist on an exchange basis or else we must go altogether upon the basis of complete State action, under which there will be no exchange, but instead production under compulsion, plus distribution according to the will of the State. An army in the field lives on these conditions, and very dis- agreeable conditions they are. Complete Socialism is not contrary to reason, though it is to freedom, but the attempt to make men exchange, not in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, but in accordance with arbi- trary rules, is contrary to reason and is bound to fail. It is an attempt to bring about the impossible.
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