Word: coaling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...