Foreign News: Mine Muddle

At every working pithead in the United Kingdom last week smut-faced coal miners voted in favor of a nation-wide strike, 409,351 to 29,215. Yet afterward, with the characteristic attitude of such leaders as Britain’s proletariat has been able to find, Secretary Ebenezer Edwards of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, which conducted the poll, commented: “Nobody wants to strike.”

Thus was broached in paradox one of the “real issues” in British life today, all of which were dodged in the recent general election by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. So desperate are conditions in the coal fields that only some 700,000 miners remain who could vote today, whereas there were 1,125,000 in 1926—the year in which the coal strike provoked the General Strike.

With hundreds of thousands of onetime coal miners on the dole and misery stalking the “depressed areas,” coal mine owners claim they cannot raise wages because their combined operating profit for the whole United Kingdom last year was only £4,000,000. The miners demand a combined wage increase of £16,500,000 and their nation-wide vote last week authorized miner leaders to order a coal strike unless this demand is met.

Strategy of the leaders was to approach His Majesty’s Department of Mines last week and brandish the proletariat’s authorization gently with the intimation that “Nobody wants to strike.”

As an issue British coal mines shape up into the question: How long can His Majesty’s Government afford to let British mine owners run their business as their fathers ran it on a basis now so antiquated and uncoordinated that the Department of Mines has for years been urging its reorganization along modern lines?