No Coal to Newcastle

HAROLD WILSON's Labor Party is British Prime Minister Edward Heath's opponent in this month's parliamentary election in name only. Heath's real opponents are the militant coal miners who have staunchly refused to let Heath get away without paying them a decent wage for their dangerous and difficult work.

The miners went out on strike last Sunday long after it became clear that Heath would not come close to meeting their demands for a 28-per-cent wage increase. Before going on strike the miners pressed their demands by refusing to work overtime. That job action reduced production in the nationalized coal industry by nearly 40 per cent, throwing an already faltering economy even further out of whack. Heath's enactment of a three-day work week was more a reaction to the miners' slowdown than to anything else.

When the British economy entered into its present difficulties, Heath found himself in dire political straits. Once the miners announced their intention to strike, he had no choice but to dissolve parliament and call for new elections--the first in Britain since 1970. What with oil shortages, I.R.A. terror bombings in London and the reduced coal production, Britons had a pretty dreary Christmas this year. Heath tried to inspire the electorate with speeches reminiscent of Churchill's inflated World War II rhetoric, but only with the barest success. The coal miners's strike now threatens England with a depression unparalleled in the last 40 years, and that's a fact that no politician's over-blown speeches can obscure.

Still, the rhetoric flows in this election campaign as Heath tries to pin the blame for England's economic crisis on the miners. The theme of Heath's Conservative Party campaign is "Who runs the country, the elected government or militant trade unions?" Heath, following the lead of Nixon and Joe McCarthy, is trying to pass the whole thing off as a communist plot in hopes that the tide of public opinion will be turned against the strikers.

Six of the mine union governing council's twenty-seven members are communists. But communists do not have numerical control of the union and the strike has the explicit support of most of the non-communist members of the governing council. When Heath requested that the miners delay the strike until after the parliamentary elections, the council voted 20 to 6 to reject Heath's proposal.

Britain's 280,000 mine workers earn between $57 and $83 a week for the time they spend in the bowels of the British earth, working to supply the nation with critical fossil fuel. They are not paid for the time it takes them to travel up and down the mine shafts. The miners are demanding an average $20-a-week pay hike, but Heath is willing to give them no more than a $6-a-week raise.

Heath's rationale for this parsimony is that he's trying to hold the line on Britain's spiraling inflation. Heath, like Nixon in the United States, has clearly been managing his economic problems at the expense of the working classes. Heath has been determined to hold down wages, but his determination has wavered when it comes to prices. The miners, traditionally a union of radical pluck, have rejected Heath's line that the business of the nation is business and have pressed on with their demands despite Heath's vilification.

The coal miners' firm stand in the face of Conservative Party opposition is not without historical precedent. Throughout the 1920s the coal mines were consistently the scene of conflict between labor and management. Between 1921 and 1924 the industry prospered and the workers received a reasonable pay increase through the influence of Ramsey MacDonald's first Labor government. When foreign competition lowered industry profits, management decided to recoup its losses by cutting workers' wages. The solution was completely unacceptable to the miners, and despite intervention by a newly elected Conservative government, the miners walked off the job. The government's position in that case, as expressed by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, was that "all workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet."

The walk-out lasted six months and was supported by a nationwide general strike in May 1926. But the government outlasted the dissident workers and at the end the miners went back to their jobs without winning any significant gains. The defeat of the miners led to a collaboration between labor and management that had been uninterrupted for nearly 50 years.

But now the collaboration has broken down and the two antagonists are once again going at each other with a vengeance. Given Britain's current economic outlook, it does not seem likely that the nation can survive another six-month strike.

In anticipation of the government's inability to outlast the miners, Heath has been trying to break the back of the strike with the weight of public opinion. Using propaganda tactics and predictions of doom if the miners get their way, Heath is skirting the economic issues behind the strike and trying to make it politically unfeasible for the miners to persist in their demands. Heath hopes to have Britons looking for reds under their beds with his charges that communists have infiltrated Britain's trade union's. His claim that the choice to be made in this election is "between extremism and moderation" indicates that the Conservative prime minister is unprepared to deal with the serious economic and distributive questions that lay behind the strike, and that he is equally at a loss to explain away the failure of his economic policies to serve the needs of the working class.

Heath's claim that the central issue of the campaign is whether the elected government or the trade unions will run the country is another clear distortion of the issues. As things stand now, the miners are only trying to win a decent living wage for themselves. The government is trying to bail itself out of its own failure by denying the miners what they deserve.

If the British electorate understands the real issues in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Edward Heath should find himself out of office after February 28. If for no other reason beside self-interest, the majority of the electorate would be less than reasonable if it accepts Heath's attempt to break the back of the inflation by breaking the back of the working class. If the voters do accept Heath's faulty analysis of the issues involved in this campaign, and if they place ultimate responsibility for Britain's recession with the miners instead of where it belongs, they will find themselves with a policy that will continue to produce recession at the expense of the workers and they will help Heath cheat the miners out of a decent standard of life.