DISASTROUS COAL WAR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18324, 15 August 1921, Page 8

DISASTROUS COAL WAR

MINERS VOTE AGAINST PEACE TERMS. THE SHEEP AND THE WOLVES. PITS RE-OPENING. (From Oub Own Correspondent.) LONDON, June 21. In view of the ballot decision, the coal stoppage will continue. The miners have voted decisively in favour (to quote the ballot paper) of “ fighting for the principle of the National Wages Board and National Pool, with loss of Government subsidy of £10,000,000 for wages, if no settlement by June 18,” and against acceptance of the terms of the Government and the owners. To the executive’s intimation of the result of the ballot the Prime Minister sent the following reply:—• “ The difficulties of the financial position can only be emphasised if the result of the baUot now communicated to me is to receive effect. Under these circumstances the Government have no option but to make final their decision that their offer of assistance cannot remain open after tomorrow (Sunday) night.” After the executive had considered the • letter, Mr Hodges made a statement in which he said:—“No conference will be held next week, nor has any decision been taken to convene one. It was decided that the executive now ask the various executives of all unions affected by wage disputes to meet the executive of the Miners’ Federation at an early date with the object of taking national action with the miners to secure their mutual demands. The executive has adjourned until called together again by the officers.” Asked if, by’ national action, the Miners’ Executive meant, strike action, Mr Hodges replied, “ That is'the implication, of course. It certainly means a general strike if the other unions will agree to it.” On the votes cast there seems no alternative to the continuance of this futile struggle, with the consequent loss of the Government’s £10.000,090, on which the prospect of a less drastic reduction of wage depends. The coal mines are nearly bankrupt, and the unions cannot squeeze blood from a stone. The taxpayer is determined that he cannot and will not pay wages, by subsidies. The ten millions represents the limit of his capacity. That is the dilemma. INFLUENCE OF EXTREMISTS. A Midland minor who holds public office in his district and commands a general respect among, his follow-workers, described the dissatisfaction among many of the ■ miners at the prolongation of the stoppage. He complained srongly of the general body of miners being dragged at the tail of the extremists, or, as he called them, the “disruplionists.” He criticised the arrangements for the ballot, and said that in his area there were 2000 spare papers, over the distribution of which there was no control. “Why do not the executive publish the pit figures instead of giving only the total?” he asked. At one pit, where the men had previously passed a unanimous resolution in favour of accepting the terms, it was announced that the number of votes cast in favour at the ballot was four. The owners’ original offer was never properly explained to them, and they did not understand the principle of the pool. The idea of the pool was put forward, in his opinion, to attract attention from the anomalies which had arisen under the flat-rate system of advances, whereby the surfacemen were now getting nearly as much as, and in numerous cases more than, the men at the coal face. ORIGIN OF THE SITUATION.

The federation tragedy of to-day (says the Labour correspondent of the Financial Times) has its genesis in the events which led up to and caused the strike of last autumn. It was the discovery of the mythical £67,000,600 which they imagined the Government had amassed as profits ot the export trade. The three discoverers of these mythical millions were Mr Frank Hodges, secretary of the federation; Mr William Brace, the then president of the South Wales Federation and now Labour Advisor of the Mines Department; and Mr Vernon Hartshorn, M.P. This triumvirate did not jntend the State—that is, the wholecommunity—to have the advantage of this £67,000,000, but they promised to share the money among the miners in a 3s per day flat rate advance, and the consumers in a 14s 2d per ton reduction in the price of domestic coal. Those fictitious millions wore so dangled before the eyes of the miners that they came out on strike. The result was that the export of British coal had to be stopped, and certain of our markets were handed over to American coal. When it was proved that, the millions were not in existence the relief of domestic consumers by a reduction of 14s 2d per ton was dropped, but the authors of the £67,000,000 fiction lacked the courage to toll the men. and to get them back to the mines the bonus on production was paid, which gave the men an extra 3s fid ■ per day for those who worked in January, but effectually shut British coal out of the export markets and severely hit the iron and steel and other industries. Here we have the origin of the present disastrous situation, with the complete stoppage of production for 11 weeks.

While the executive in a moment of despair look wistfully to a general strike to help thorn out of their difficulties, what is likely to happen to their own members? All the indications are that the men will break away and make the best bargain they can to resume work. The most significant thing about a ballot taken when the men wore idle is that 250,001 of them did not take the trouble to record their votes. If the reports from some of the colliery districts are accurate, largo numbers of the men are about to resume work, and once that happens the collapse of the strike is inevitable, because the men everywhere will follow the lead. It is the menace of disruption that hangs over the federation today. That is the price which the Miners’ Federation has to pay for putting political false gods in the place of sound trade union principles. LEADERS LACK COURAGE.

Mr J. Baker, secretary of the Midland Miners’ Federation, addressing 10,000 Cannock Chase miners, said that the time had come when there must be some straight talk. “The executive wanted the miners to accept the coal-owners’ offer in the recent ballot,” he stated, “but they would not take the responsibility of advising the men to that effect. I told the officials in London that they required courage enough in this business to tell the miners what was at the back of their mind. They should be in a position to tell the men whether the industry can stand more than the proposals contain or not.” A SERIES OF BLUNDERS.

“Public opinion has honestly striven to think as well as it possibly could of the miners and their leaders,’’ says the Daily Telegraph, “and to accept at their face value their protestations of deep concern for the national well-being. But it becomes increasingly difficult. The Miners’ Executive began with the criminal blunder of calling out the safety-men from the mines, and it is now known that on Friday last the extremist section did its best to carry a resolution in favour of bringing them out again, and thus reporting to ‘methods of frightfulness’ in order to force the mineowners and the Government' to their knees. The second great blunder they made was that of putting the ‘National Pool’ in the forefront of the struggle, and pretending—for it was no more than a pretence—that this was the object dearest to the miners" hearts, when all the time what alone they cared for was the amount of their earnings. And they blundered again, when, after tacitly dropping the Pool and consenting to take a ballot on the Government’s offer, they did not recommend the urgency of its acceptance. It is no secret that the moderates hoped that the adverse vote would not reach the two-thirds majority required for the strike’s continuance. But many who talked in this strain in private spoke in public of the inadequacy and inacceptability of the Government’s proposals, and the extremists, as usual, alone were bold and outspoken in advising the miners to vote the proposals down. The abstention of 300,000 men gave the extremists their victory, and now that the Government’s offer is withdrawn, the last state is worse than the first. It is a momentary triumph for the hot-heads, who do not care what becomes of the mining industry or what becomes of the general trade of the country, so long ns they have their way, and the pitiful thing for Labour is that its official organ has throughout been allowed to advocate the violent view, and now represents the result of the ballot ns ‘a majestic decision, and calls upon trade unionists to get together, assuring them that they are ‘omnipotent if they will organise themselves into a fighting machine, directed from the centre by men who believe in fighting.’ ’’ EXPOSURE/ OF MIXERS’ EXECUTIVE. “Revolutionaries of Moscow,” says the Morning Post, “who are now aspiring to lend or drive the working men into revolution, are not so'foolish as to suppose that the workman will win his demands by such methods. No, they do not care a straw whether the workman wins or loses, but they expect to gain what they are working for. which is destruction. The powers of

darkness wrestle with the angels of light for the soul of our working men at this present moment. And in this dark struggle the country is being torn to pieces and reduced to ruin. If there is any light anywhere wo find it in the terrible exposure of the Miners’ Executive. They led their unfortunate followers into a desperate situation, and had not the courage to lead them out again. The ballot is, partly, at least, a gesture of disgust at the leadership of the leaders. They have no leadership; there is not among them one with the moral courage to say—Wo have failed; this national pool is a pool over which plays the will-o’-the-wisp of nationalisation. V\o are now bogged in it; it grows deeper; let us go back. No; their cry is to the other trade unions to come in and bo bogged also, until the whole country, if it be possible, is*engulfed in this quagmire of the national pool. What leadership! Will the other trade unions rush in where the transport workers and raihvaymen refuted to go? Wo shall see. Tlie hearts of the bulk of our working men are still sound. They are confused and bewildered by lack of leadership. Here, surely, is a chance for the employer. He, alter all, is the true leader of his men, although he has so long been separated from tliem by the hirelings on both sides. Could the owners make an offer, not to the unions any longer, but to the men themselves, to shake off this terrible enchantment, and he, as in the old days, once more the true partners of the mine-owners in that great British industry which is almost a nation in itself. And those wise and courageous workers who have'started work at the mines, in spite of their leaders, surely deserve some part of the £10,000,000. for they have fulfilled the conditions of the Prime Ministers contract.’ “EPITAPH” OF THE STRIKE. An important statement was made today, at the Labour Party Conference at Brighton, by Mr F. Hodges (secretary of the Miners’ Federation). “I think,” he began, “it will be agreed by all delegates that the miners in this struggle have put up a great epic fight for what they believe to be right. One says it with some amount of pride that this is characteristic of our people. When they start to fight they fight until they can fight no longer. We believe that we are not only fighting our own battle, but wo are helping our comrades to fight their battles. They had tried to penetrate deeper down into the strength and the weakness of the induustrial movement as a whole, and the conclusion that they had drawn was that industrially the trade-union movement was for the most part unhappily a mere grouping of close corporations with only the interest of the particular group at stake and at heart, and as the British movement developed they found that tendency more and more marked. “We, who are the leaders of this movement,” he continued, “will have to take a great deal of responsibility on ourselves rather than allow this huge mass of the population to go on and on and on till the breaking point comes and chaos and disaster reign where now discipline and good-will and solidarity hold the field. It may be that we shall have to bend and bow_ to the inevitable forces that surround us. With- : out a doubt, in fact historicallly, it is the 'Government, and the Government alone, that is responsible for the unhappy pass to which we have been brought. I believe the miners, when this is over, will never again rest content until they have expressed their hostility as effectively and ns constitutionally as possible towards this Government in their attempt to bring it down.”