THE GREAT COAL STRIKE

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXXIII, Issue 15920, 4 May 1912, Page 5

THE GREAT COAL STRIKE

WHAT IT HAS EFFECTED

i THE MINIMUM WAGE BILL. (By JAMES THORN.) The national strike of British colliers is, at the moment of writing, in tho third week of its duration. As an incident in history it quite eclipses in magnitude and effect the greatest evont in tho chronicles of public school historians. No wax, no dynastic squabble, ever threatened 60 rapid a national disruption, and certainly no exploit of Drake or Wellington ever added so much to the stature of" commonsenso as this peaceful refusal to labour in the pits. All authorities are agreed that the strike has brought the nation to the brink of dissolution, and that it has involved industry generally in something like a calamity. But calamity is not always sterile. It yields revelations sometimes, and mirrors the reality of things. Thus the minors' strike, by arresting industry, has given as one of its first fruits a very general consciousness of the elementary fact that society , rests upon the straining shoulders of Labour, and that it disintegrates upon tho withdrawal in any considerable degree of the efforts of even its most despised members. From the sense of its •dependency upon the industrial worker for its very existence there has risen_ in tho public mind a recogr'tion of social responsibility in the matter of removing injustice from the conduct of industry. This is i oil -kri +.liq nnnA TUVvrprvpAiv in its imme-

diate concrete results the strike has achieved purposes which a month ago were unthinkable as practicalities, and which were then met with jibes and ridicule from tho doctrinaires of Britishpolitics. Five weeks ago the House of Commons threw out with cheery solidarity a Labour Party amendment to j the Address-in-Reply regretting the omission of proposals to establish a legal minimum wa.R'e. As these lines are beins; penned. Parliament is discussing a Minimum Wage Bill, introduced by the Government, "which is to be passed through all its stages under urgency rules by the end of the week I The projection of the principle of the lejral minimum '■ into British legislation is the supreme .effect of the miners' strike, and gives to the miners the credit of destroying with one stroke the Manchester School pronouncement that " wages can only be determined by the law of supply and demand " —an achievement most obviously foreshadowing radical modifications in the relations of the_ State with the industries which sustain it. In sober fact the miners by their splendid unity have abruptly enforced what intellectual .propaganda was but ineffective surraort for, a parliamentary acknowledgement that industry must guarantee a minimum rate of -payment to those employed in it. This is a tremendous progressive gain in Great Britain and is a testimoney to the might of bold and decisive organisation. EXTENT OF INDUSTRIAL PARALY-

SIS. Despite an eleventh-hour intervention on tho part of the Government and a revision of the miners' demands, which reduced the minimum schedules to amounts varying between 4s lid end 7s 6d a day, all negotiations to establish an individual minimum wage by agreement proved abortive. The English coal-owners, who constituted a majority of the employers, agreed with tho principle of a. minimum wage and were prepared to discuss a definite figure, but tho Welsh and Scotch owners refused to concede even the principle and their objections made the succession of conferences barren of any agreeable result. The dead-lock being complete, Mr Asquith interposed to intimate tho broad lines upon which the Government was ready to legislate for the settlement of-the dispute." These were, that legislation would be introduced recognising the workers' right to a minimum wage, while embodying provisions safe-guarding the employers against malingering and constituting district boards armed with compulsory powers to fix the minimum rate. The minors, while consenting to discuss their schedules with the object of proving their justice and practicability, insisted upon their unqualified acceptance and, with a wholly consistent support of their general policy, declined to submit their case to compulsory arbitration. The negotiations and Government intervention failing, the men were called out and responded unanimously in almost every pit in the Kingdom. Tho unanimity was remarkable. About 1,000,000 mine workers in coal areas, scattered over 9000 square miles

of country, "lifted their graitn, as they say in Scotland. Not all these are Trades Unionists but the largo ma- ! jority are. As in the railway and dockers' strikes, however, the non-unionists came out with their fellow-workers and I only in an infinitesimal number of cases have they remained at work. Coal production in a day was brought to a standstill. The effect upon industry was immediate and far-reaching. Most of the iron-smelting furnaces, which, being near the coal-fields, kept no large accumulations, but supplied their requirements in somewhat hand-to-mouth fashion, closed down instantly. For. the-same reason the pottery towns of Staffordshire were thrown idle in the first week. The textile industry, which had just recovered from an extensive lock-out, shrivelled up. Engineering and gas production suffered enormously. Train, tramway and coastal shipping services were greatly curtailed. Indeed, hardly an activity in the United Kingdom escaped diminution , or complete dislocation by the cessation . of the coal supply. The estimates of unemoloyment in the trades most sorely hit, classify the number of disemployed ■ workers as follows:

Textile workers ■. 107,000 Bailwaymen , > 87,000 Labourers . > 34,000 Dockers •, , . 69,000 Sailors . . » 30,000 Brickraakera . » 30,000 Potterv workers i . 60,000 Gasworkers 1 ; 20,000 Engineers . • 15,000 These, together with the miners and hundreds of thousands of lace-workers, coal-porters, soap and chemical workers, implement-makers, shop-assistants, ! quarrymen and others make an approximate total of 2,000,000 _ in the army of unemployment. It is a biting comment upon the utility of the social order that this ten to twelve! days' loss of work has plunged thou-' sands of theso workers into conditions, of starvation. To what extent wealth ■ production has been stayed is revealed in the fact that 21,000,000 days of working time have been passed in unproductive idleness, and that five and three-quarter millions sterling in wages have been withheld in consequence—a terrible tribute to tho supremacy of continuously exerted labour as a factor in the maintenance of social i organisation and progress. Quite unforeseen by what is known as • the " general public" tho drain on : Trades Union finance is tremendous. : One Union, for instance, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, is dis- ' i hursing £30,000 a week in unemployed ■ benefits to its members. In total, the I' trades unions are paying out a weekly < sum of £300,000, which rate, suppos- : ing the strike to continue for six more < weeks, will_ bankrupt every trades ' union combination in the kingdom, i This aspect of the general situation is < naturally causing some apprehension , ( in the trades union world, and an * i early and favourable settlement is 1 anxiously hopod for, but the absorp- j i ijon of trades union funds, though J; daily intimated, by tho anti-trades )

union Press as a "hopeful" symptom, has in no way prejudiced the complete sympathy accorded the miners by their organised comrades in other industries. In these quarters it is plainly recognised that tho victory of the miners will remove many obstructions to the success of general trades union propaganda, and that therefore they merit the very strongest support of combined Labour. The miners' strike is only part of the strategy for the betterment of the workers. No section is more certain of this than that which opposes trades unionism. Tho chief complaint of this section is that tho Government's Minimum Wage Bill is an incitement to all workers to emulate the miners and "to go and do likewise." These inferences are justly drawn. That is precisely what the workers will do and what every patriot will assist them in doing. 'ln Britain things move swiftly these days. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE STRIKERS. Nothing has redounded more to the miners' crodit than their irreproachable behaviour during the dispute. Despite the enormous number of men engaged and despite the fact that for weeks they have been .libellously described by tho " yellow" Press as "drunkards," "gamblers," "scum," "lazy and ignorant," no inclination to riot has been manifested. The absence of turbulence and the general calm of the proceedings have perplexed certain journalistic coteries, and the avidity with which they pounce on anything which can be construed into a disturbance and set it out with startling headline and minute detail seems to suggest that a course of calculated vio--1«n/.« -.vmlA

problem for them. They would be justified in their abuse of the miners and in their frenzied clamour for the military. But in this the miners have • disappointed them. The miners' magnificent conduct has a twofold explanation. First, that effective combination i is its own reward, or, to put it another way, that masterly inactivity is a superior tactic to unintelligent activity. The'restraints of conscious power have i been developed by organisation. Second, that the Government has not blundered by converting the strike areas into a military camp. As the railway and dockers' upheavals show .the most provocative thing a Government can do during a labour dispute '' is to rush soldiery into the affected districts. This is not only resented by the strikers themselves, but by those civilians who feel that the army is maintained for entirely different purposes. In the course of tho transport stoppage last year, tho Government not oily divided the Kingdom into military districts, under the control of generals, but pushed thousands of troops into areas where feeling was most strained, and, as in the case of the city of Manchester, did this even against the advice of the local authorities. The expected happened. Excitement, already intense, was accentuated, violences were committed, British workers were shot down by British soldiers, tha features of a civil war were initiated. No government could stand the shock to its prestige caused by a series of similar mistakes. Accordingly, when the miners withdrew their labour, the Gov-

ernment withheld its soldiery. Consaquontly, as the Ministry itself has admitted, the conduct of the strikers has been exemplary and nothing has hap- \ pened beyond an isolated demonstration against a few strike-breakers to necessitate more than tho attention of local police.. No more forceful censure of the Churchill policy of military intimidation could be imagined than the pacific bearing of the men on all the coal-fields. THE RIGHT OF FREE SPEECH. The good sense of the Government in this connection, however, is to a certain extent the virtue of necessity. Had the miners been bo politically weak that Government could have _ afforded to insult them, the soldiers would have been moved about and excesses provoked. But the miners have a controlling interest in at least one hundred parliamentary divisions—a power which demands consideration. As it was rumours were so persistent at the beginning of the strike that military force was to be employed that the National Council of the Independent Labour Party drew up an appeal for_ circulation amongst the soldiery, urging them to refuse to shoot their brothers of the working class. Upon receiving a Ministerial assurance that the rumours were unreliable, this appeal was not sent out. Had it been so, the members of the Council would have been liable to arrest and imprisonment, as subsequent events proved. This is where, the government has exhibited an unquestionable class bias and exposes its change of military policy as a dovice of expediency only. A little group of men, led by Tom Mann, have for some months been teaching tho principles of

; syndicalism to British Trades Union- ] ists. Their numbers are negligible, though their influence, under pressure of a combination of industrial and political conditions, is wider than most people are ready to admit, which, it might he added in parenthesis, is not to eay that syndicalism has inspired the recent strikes. They publish a very small paper and monthly pamphlets upon the progress of their propaganda, and in their official organ issued a manifesto to soldiers calling on them not to shoot the strikers if called upon to do so. For this the editor of the paper, its printers and a railway stoker have been arrested. For protesting against their arrest and for advising soldiers to mutiny in preference to shooting their fellow- j countrymen Tom Mann has also been ' apprehended, and refused bail. To understand the indignation aroused among Trades Unionists by this attack upon free speech it need only be said that the action was taken under a law passed in 1797, when not a member of the middle or working classes had a vote in British politics. What throws the diligence of the legal opponents of Labour into conspicuous

relief is that not one prosecution has been made under this law since 1804. So that for 108 years it has been a dead letter on the statute book 1 That it has been excavated from the must;v past to be used against freedom' of speech is trenchantly condemnatory of those who sought to use it. It is in- [ tolerable that soldiers can be ordered ! to shoot to kill, and that men who protest by asking them to obey the Sixth Commandment should be laid in gaol under laws forgotten and as wicked as they are out-of-date. Yet that is the law in Christian England I This incident is only one of many raised by the miners' strike, which indicate the monstrous difficulties with which every progressive movement has to contend in the Mother Country. PROPOSALS FOR INDUSTRIAL PEACE. As one of its results, the strike has a crop of suggestions for the pacification of industry. This is a rather troubled corner in the life of men, and it is questionable whether the majority of these proposals will do more than stereotype and exasperate the causes of unrest and dissatisfaction. The Tory papers, for instance, proclaim their mental bankruptcy by insisting upon the sequestration of Union funds, by clamouring to make strikes "criminal conspiracies," and by treating as " treason felony" all attempts to indues a strike. Strangely enough, all this leads to compulsory arbitration, which, although from another point of view, has an ardent advocate in the Hon W. P. Reeves. A part of the Liberal Press, too, claims compulsory arbitration as " the natural corollary to a minimum wage." The groat objection to compulsory arbitration in Great Britain is that it would not > work. Not only is an impartial judiciary required for its success, but it must be supported by the consent of

organised Labour. And neither of these requirements can be satisfied. Labour is suspicious of compulsory arbitration, and unanimously rojects all proposals that negate_ its right to strike. No wonder, for it is really almost a weekly occurrence for Judges, in the delivery of their decisions, to indulge in irreler vant diatribes against Trades Unionism and Labour movements, showing that they cannot be trusted for an impartiality in their judgments upon industrial differences. Only this week such ah attack upon Labour from the judicial bench led to a "scene" in the House of Commons. It is not to be expected that Labour will readily -forego its right to strike and place the sole ordering 6f its conditions in the'hands of ■ men who frankly disclose their hostility. Tho determination to resist compulsion is not reduced by Tory agitation for impounding Trades Union finance as a remedy for striking, and certainly it is strengthened by the knowledge of tho delays and evasions which marked-the conciliation scheme for railwaymen. and which caused the' railway strike last year. The success of arbitration depends upon psychological conditions as well as upon a comparative simplioity in industrial customs and methods. Lacking those, it collapses. As yet Great Britain is ready for industrial peace because in economic affairs it is too indolent to enforce principles of justice. These, however, have been given a powerful stimulus by the strike, as tho Minimum "Wage Bill witnesses, while in its exemplification of the power of closely organised Labour the strike has encouraged a wider combination of the workers, has compelled society to look to the keeping of its hoiise in older, and has given the workers a consciousness of their importance in the scheme of things. All this is highlv necessary to progress. The great State is 'impossible without organisation, without, a public interested in its corporate life, and without worker* proud of their own capacity and sensible of tlieir value.