Labor and the Brass Hats

Some 30 members of the House of Commons are onetime coal miners; they know the labor problems of the mines firsthand. Among the ablest of them is Welsh Laborite Aneurin Bevan of Ebbw Vale (pronounced Ebba Vale).

Last week, when ex-Miner Bevan stood up in the House to talk about coal, he went as accurately and painfully as a dentist's drill to the sorest spot in the British Government's war-labor policy.

To a skeptical House, Secretary of Mines David R. Grenfell had announced that the Government hoped to be mining all the coal it needed by the end of next winter. As it was, production was 25,000,000 tons short of the 200,000,000-ton goal for the year. This was too much for Bevan. He knew that 75,000 miners had left the pits in the last year, that the Army had taken 50,000 of them. He knew also that less than one-tenth of them had been replaced by drafted labor, that the Army had refused to release miner-soldiers when coal production dropped alarmingly.

Said Bevan acidly: "What stopped their return was that the Prime Minister thought about the matter romantically, while the brass hats advised him stupidly. ... In fact the Government is the only enemy the generals have so far been able to defeat."

A painful subject to thoughtful Britons is the brass hats' attitude toward the labor shortage. The brass hats wish in all circumstances to keep Britain's 4,000,000-man Army in the field. In spite of military experts, who insist that the power of a modern army lies in its mechanization plus a huge force of industry behind it, the brass hats have prevailed.

Official Army point of view is that it needs every man possible to guard against the invasion of Britain which Winston Churchill warned might come by Sept. 1. Until the invasion the men are largely idle, and the Army resists all efforts to put them to work, even on Blitz clearance or other emergency work.

As serious as the labor shortage in the coal industry are shortages in agriculture, retail trades, building. Though Britain has 4,000,000 more acres under cultivation than she did before the war, the Army has called up thousands of farm workers, plans to take 20,000 more after the next harvest. The 30,000 land girls, conscientious objectors, interned aliens and volunteer farm workers do not even fill the gap numerically. With a Government budget of -L-350,000,000 a year for emergency construction, the building trades have been calling desperately for some of the 100,000 building workers in the Army.

London's Evening Standard last week pointedly quoted the man who led Britain to victory in World War I, David Lloyd George, on how he did it: "In this country we insisted, in the teeth of a furious outcry from staff officers and their friends, on retaining in the industrial side of warfare the men needful for equipping our forces with those mechanical aids and armaments which would avail to save their lives and ease their task." But in the last war there were a lot of Frenchmen to keep the Germans from crossing the Channel.

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