Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1926. FACING A CRISIS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 107, 6 April 1926, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1926. FACING A CRISIS.

The Mother Country is facing a serious crisis in connection with the coal ruining industry. The subsidies paid by the Government to avert a complete breakdown in the industry in the autumn of last year temporarily tided the country over tlie very serious difficulty occasioned by the lack of agreement between the miners and the mine owners. On the one hand, with higher labour costs and shorter hours of working, the output had decreased materially; many mines were being worked at a loss; British coal was beingundersold on the Continental markets, where the competition of coal from Westphalia, produced at a much cheaper cost by low priced labour, working longer hours, was driving the British commodity out of the market. The mine owners contended they could not continue paying the wages the British miners were receiving, unless the output was increased and the working day, or shift, extended by one hour. The miners, on the other hand, were demanding increased rates of pay, no increase in the working hours, and conditions which the mine owners felt would only increase their difficulties. The miners refused to discuss an increase in the hours of working, or to accept the alternative in the shape of reduced wages. A deadlock ensued and the threatened upheaval in the industry, which it was expected would extend to the transport workers and the engineering trades, etc., was only averted by Mr Baldwin’s action in agreeing to subsidise tho industry for six months, on terms which maintained the status quo. In the interval, the industry seems to have drifted into a state of even greater depression, as, in October last, 19.9 per cent, of the workers, ordinarily engaged in coal-mining, were out of employment, the number of unemployed having risen from 129,994 in October, 1924, to 246,872 in October, 1925, an increase of 116,878. The commission set up by Mr Baldwin to investigate the position in the industry, and to suggest ameliorative measures, has, in the interval, taken voluminous evidence. Amongst other things it has been clearly shown that the cost of production so greatly exceeds the selling price of coal that it is impossible for the industry to support the burden, and that, unless a reduction of coal prices becomes possible, the coal export trade —once the stay of British indus-

try—must suffer. The colliery owners claimed that an extension of the working hours was' “the only step that offered an immediate, certain and substantial measure .of relief,” and they showed, in a specially prepared table, the reduction in the costs of production that would be secured by a reversion to the eighthour day. They also asked for district, in place of national wage agreements, freedom from political interference and the removal of the subsidy at the earliest opportunity. Mr A. J. Cook, the miners’ secretary, whose Communistic views have made him one of the most dangerous of the Labour Socialist leaders in Great Britain, has counselled the miners to resist each and all of the colliery owners’ proposals and the position is complicated, because the terms the owners ask tho miners to accept, involve corresponding reductions in railway rates, which would have to be reduced by 25 per cent., probably entailing a reduction in the wages paid to railwaymen, together with the almost immediate dismissal of 100,000 miners, until such time as trade sufficiently revived to permit of their re-employment. Even with the increased working hours, reduced wages and railway rates, etc., the mine owners contend that the industry, as a whole, would be earning no profits, and would actually be run at a loss of threepence per ton.