By William Pomeroy Aitter a month-long national strike, following thirteen weeks of -an over- time ban to press a wage claim, the coal miners of Britain, on March 6, won one of their greatest victories in a long history of militant struggle. Their National Union’ of Mineworkers had not only gained a major wage increase for its 264,000 mem- bers; its determined fight had had a far- reaching political effect, contributing to the ouster from office of a Conservative (Tory) Party government. In Britain the coal miners, to an ex- tent perhaps greater than in any other country, have been in the vanguard of the trade union movement. They have a rec- ord of struggle unmatched by any other sector of the organized British workers, and they embody the best characteristics of the British working class. ~ As an organization, the National Union of Mineworkers did not come inio being until 1945. Miners’ organization, however, began in the 1880s, in the form of regional federations set up in the var- ious coal areas that are widely scattered in Britain. These gradually developed into a Miners’ Federation of Great Brit- ~ ain that existed for decades until a gen- uine national body covering the whole industry could be achieved. Regional un- ion organization, however, still prevails, with Scotland, South Wales, Yorkshire, northeast England, the Midlands, South- east England (Kent) and other areas where big coal deposits lie having .their own conference rights, officers and nego- tiating procedures. ~ : A national union became indispensable to meet the tactics of the employers and pit owners, perhaps the most ruthless collection of exploiters in pre-war Brit- ain. They tried, for example, to impose regionally varied pay scales to bring down the wage level. Mine owners were among the stal- warts of the Tory Party. Winston Churchill, when he was Home Secretary in 1910. sent troops against the striking. miners of South Wales in the Tonypandy. riots. ‘4 ee the British labor movement, a great high point was the General Strike of 1926, when the entire organized work- ing class came out in frontal class battle against the united capitalists..The issue was support of a miners’ strike, waged against a drive by the reactionary mine owners to scrap previous agreements with the workers and to force wage cuts, longer hours and a reversion to regional rather than national mine wage policies. The slogan of A.J. Cook, militant secre- tary of the miners’ federation at that time, was “‘Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day.” The General Strike was called on ‘May 1, 1926 by the Trades Union Congress. It lasted for nine days, during which Brit- ain virtually ground to a halt. On May 9 the right-wing leaders of the Trade Union Congress, flinching at gov- ernment threats of arrest and imprison- ment, called off the strike, which was solid, with high worker morale. The min- ers, betrayed, were left alone to face the strengthened and vengeful capitalists. They accepted the challenge and held out for seven months in one of the bitterest strikes of all time. Eventually, in De- cember 1926, they were compelled to yield and to suffer savage wage cuts, longer working hours and loss of other gains. That was under a Tory government. They defeated the miners then, but at massive costs to the capitalist economy which was never quite the same again. Tory leaders at that time were said to have sworn to avoid show-down: fights with the miners in the future. The miners themselves have never forgotten 1926. Its scars, its lessons, and its indomitable . unity remain in every close-knit pit vil- _ lage, where the greatest British working class traditions are to be found. As early as 1919 a national miners’ ~ m eS eee Poo PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, APRIL 12, .1974—PAGE 8 : Tet eT PE British — miners — a history of struggle conference had called for the nationaliza- tion of the coal mines and for a measure of workers’ control. (The Bolshevik Oc- tober Revolution was a factor in British workers’ militancy of the period.) Na- tionalization of*Britain’s coal industry did not come until 1947, in implementa- tion of the Coal Industry Nationalization Act of 1946, adopted by the vigorous first Labor Party government after World War II. Mine owners’ greed and lack of investment had left the industry run down and low paid, yet the 200 scattered com- panies they operated were bought out by the staggering sum of over $1 billion in public funds. Nationalization was not the real so- cialist advance miners had fought for. Capitalist strictures limit Britain’s na- tionalized industries. The National Coal. Board, with which miners have to nego- tiate for wage increases, has to show an annual profit or break even, and revela- tions have been made of enormous profit drains to private suppliers and other con- tractors while the NCB argues that it has no funds to raise wages. Worst of all, miners have been the vic- tims of other decisions by Britain’s big corporate interests, especially the power- ful oil companies, Shell and British Pe- troleum (also the U.S. Esso and Gulf), which pressured both Tory and Labor governments to rely on imported oil, chiefly from the Middle East, instead of less profitable coal. As a result Britain, immensely rich in coal beds, has run down its coal industry: the 1,160 pits existing in 1947 have been cut to only 261 today, and the number of. Miners shrank from around 700,000 in 1950 to 264,000 at present. Coal production has been nearly halved from a postwar peak of around 230 million tons. Miners have been leaving a deteriorating badly- paid coal industry at a rate of 600 per week, over 20,000 a year. The fight to maintain decent wages’ and conditions in tee Se Mick McGahey, Communist vice- arriving for talks in January 1974. 5 Staffordshire miners in 1842, an TIilus- trated London News drawing. these circumstances has been bitter. In 1970. the Tory Party returned to power, determined to throw the burdens of a growing economic crisis onto: the working class, with ruthless anti-trade. union, wage-restricting, strike-penalizing laws. To break worker resistance, the Tories chose a show-down with the miners, hoping for a repetition of 1926. The first clash came in January-February 1972, when the NUM won a brilliantly con- ducted strike for a wage increase, stun- ning the Tories with its popular support. In November 1973 the Tory govern- ment, out for vengeance, again forced a show-down on the miners. This time they had a political objective, to provoke . an artificial situation of economic emer- gency and hardship that could be blamed on the miners and enable the discredited Heath regime to call an election on the issue of ‘‘Who governs Britain, the govern- ment or the extremist miners’ leaders?”’ Although between November and Feb- ruary 1974 the NUM adopted only an:over- time ban, Heath put industry on a three- day week, cut electricity for homes, stores and street lighting, and sought to whip up anti-union hysteria. He focused attacks on the six Communists on the 26- man NUM national executive, especially on the Communist vice-president, Michael McGahey, who was accused of trying to overthrow the government by strike action. : _ The Tories tried to split the miners by calling for the ‘‘moderates’’ to stand up against the “extremists.” The only NUM executive member to do so, Frank Smith from the Leicestershire pit district, was denounced by his own district mem- bers, who walked out on strike when he made a TV statement that the miners were hurting the nation. Smith was forced to attend a membership meeting where he was denounced and compelled to make _ 4 public apology that “I am sorry and herewith categorically state that the _ at each pit or coal yard (The ‘their wage position deterio? president of the National Union of Mineworkers, > cae ys