The Coal Dispute.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20574, 16 June 1932, Page 8

The Coal Dispute.

In an interview reported in The Pbsss yesterday Dr. Marsden, Secretary of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, drew attention to a report on the coal industry, prepared at the Prime Minister's request by three expert investigators. Their comments and recommendations are of great interest and point to a number of possible means by which the demand for coal and coal products may be stimulated. But what is most striking in the report, and particularly striking at the present, moment, is the strongly expressed and reiterated opinion that the excessive mining costs must be reduced and can easily be rednced by relaxing conditions which have been introduced since 1914, gradually raising the cost of coal-production with "little material " benefit to the workers." It is not in the co-operative system of mining that the report sees either "the best solution" or any "permanent solution" of the present difficulty, but in closer cooperation between owners and miners within the present system of agreement on wages and conditions; and the advice given id the report, that both parties should together seek a solution " based on a frank recognition of the "facts of the industry on both sides,' is strictly applicable in the dispute which still continues. It will not continue much longer without losing its pacific character, and that is the danger which the public cannot help recogniaiog and fearing; tojt it ought not to

continue for a day. The miners have made the capital mistake of striking, in the northern fields when they were already in conference with the owners, on the West Coast when their conference was promised and in view. They could remedy that and would lose no advantage whatever by going back to work at once. They would in fact gain more than pay by doing so. But there is no reason why their return to work and the arrangement of a conference should not be simultaneous and immediate. Agreement to confer appears to be delayed by no more obstinate a difference than lies between the owners' preliminary condition that mine managers must be free to engage and discharge men as they think fit, on the one hand, and the miners' demand that this freedom must be " fairly" used. The right to it has already been conceded by the president of the Northern Miners' Union. The public does not believe, and will not readily believe, that there is anything in this difference which could not be dissolved by lialf-an-hour's plain talk between men who, on either side, depend for their living on the prosperity of an industry. Yet since there is no other obstacle to a conference, the public sees the strike continuing because a right is claimed by one side and undisputed by the other, whose questions could be answered and fears satisfied in ten minutes; and this situation is only not absurd because it threatens to develop into a worse one.