Coal Is the Tyrant

At the heart of Europe's sickness last week, underlying its dollar deficiencies, its currency distempers, its lack of pep and its chronic sweat and tears, was a shortage of one grubby product--coal.

Old King Coal is the economic tyrant of Europe. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, he chills the poor, rocks governments, distorts economies and hampers rearmament. In the West he threatens to undo much of the good done by the Marshall Plan; in the East he blocks Communist Five-Year plans.

In Paris last week, Premier Rene Pleven gave French deputies a lesson in elementary economics. "I am amazed," he said, "that no one has pointed out the real reason why prices have risen more sharply in France than elsewhere in Europe. The coal price influences the cost of almost everything else."

Some of the symptoms of the disease:

P:Of every dollar France gets in U.S. aid, she now spends 75-c- to import coal from the U.S. at ruinously expensive prices. Coal that costs $10 a ton in Pennsylvania sells for $22 a ton in Europe, after shipping costs are added.

P:Europe's industrial output has increased 40% over prewar, but coal--which industry depends on--is down 7%.

P:Britain, short of 1,500,000 tons of steel for its armament program, last week imposed a strict steel-rationing program. First priority among steel uses went to coal; defense and export production must take second place.

P:Britain, which used to ship abroad 44 million tons a year, no longer produces enough coal to stoke its own fires and furnaces. The new Tory government had laid down the most stringent household coal rationing in the nation's history: an average of less than two tons for the entire winter.

Empty Bank Vaults. The consequences to Western defense are immense and progressive ; they would be disastrous but for a relatively mild winter. But British families do without meat because there is not enough coal to swap for Argentine beef; French steel mills stand idle for lack of coal and coke. The Dutch army all but disappeared over the holidays, when the government gave its soldiers an eleven-day furlough to save precious coal. Sweden sells its high-grade iron ore to Communist Poland instead of supplying its old customer Britain, because the Poles can trade coal in exchange, the British cannot. The Poles, taking advantage of Sweden's need, get ballbearings and generators in exchange, to nourish the Red army.

West German coal production is increasing by leaps & bounds (since 1946, output has jumped 300%). But though the International Ruhr Authority still earmarks 25% of German output for export (mainly to France), French steelmen complain that Ruhr shipments of coke and coal have fallen by 25% since 1949. And German nationalists are whipping up resentment against compulsory coal exports: they accuse the Allies of sending Ruhr coal abroad, and compelling Germany to import more expensive U.S. coal.

U.S. coal is flooding into Bremen, Rotterdam and other European ports at the rate of 4,000,000 tons a month. In one way, it does more harm than good: to fill its coal scuttles with costly U.S. coal, Europe is emptying its bank vaults of precious U.S. dollars which could be more profitably invested in new mining machinery. Moreover, sky-high U.S. coal prices have sent all other prices soaring.

Getting It Dug. The U.S. Mutual Security Agency has one word for Europe's coal situation: "Shocking." Most of Europe's economic problems could be solved by a 5% increase in European coal production. There is plenty of coal in the ground: South Wales alone has known reserves of 10 billion tons, enough to last several centuries. The problem is: how to get it dug.

What is stopping the diggers? Each nation has its own explanation. Britain is short of labor: nothing the nationalized coal industry has done (e.g., higher wages, social security) can induce more Britons to work in the pits. Full employment is partly to blame: coal miners' sons don't want to work underground when there are safer, cleaner jobs above.

Last year, the Labor government tried to import 5,000 unemployed Italians to work in the pits (70,000 could be used). For every miners' lodge that agreed to take Italians, four turned thumbs down. In one area, 93 out of 100 pits refused to have "foreigners." So far, only 600 Italians are at work.

West Germany has abundant labor (1,300,000 unemployed), but output per man shift is 30% lower than it was prewar. A fourth of the Ruhr miners' homes were destroyed during the war. Today one in every ten miners is forced to leave his family in some other part of Germany, while he lives in a barn or an old air-raid shelter near the pits. At the Zollverein mine, near Essen, 1,500 homeless miners live in bleak, clapboard cabins sprawling in the shadow of the pithead. The turnover among them is immense. "They don't budge in winter," said a mine official. "But when the spring comes round, you see a look in their eye, and one day they're gone."

In Belgium, after watching miners struggling to push loaded coal cars over an uneven tunnel floor, a West Virginia mining engineer named Neil Robinson offered to slash production costs from $14 to $11 a ton--if given a free hand. The skeptical Belgians agreed; Robinson has since set to work injecting U.S. zest and know-how into one of Belgium's oldest and deepest pits--the Good Hope Mine. If he succeeds, and the chances are that he will, MSA hopes to use the "Robinson Experiment" to spark similar coalface production drives throughout Western Europe.

The Poles Got Orders. Fortunately, King Coal's tyranny knows no Iron Curtain. Gross coal output is rising, especially in Red Poland, which has replaced Britain as Europe's No. 1 exporter (31 million tons in 1950). But the Russian war machine gulps more coal and steel than the U.S.S.R. can produce; to keep it rolling, the Reds are squeezing every bit of production they can get out of the satellite mines and mills. The Poles got orders to step up coal production by one-third. Hungarian playwrights and poets have been told to forget such themes as "love" and "adventure" and to concentrate instead on "what is more important to the People's Republic: getting more coal out of the ground."

To dig more coal, the Communists have organized a vast slave labor program. Polish mines have been reinforced by convicts, military conscripts, students who fail their examinations and members of the SP (Service to Poland) youth organization. Czechoslovakia drafted 77,500 minor bureaucrats into the pits in one sweeping purge. The Communists get coal by a combination of threats, rewards ("Banner of Labor" decorations), bonuses, extra food, and discipline.

The West, which balks at the more successful Communist methods, could only counter with pleas to the miners, better working conditions for them, more skill in production, less waste in consumption, and as a last resort--that old popular refrain, help from the U.S. This week in Paris, the Council of Ministers of 18 Western nations will gather for an emergency session on coal. Unless their experts make wise and bold plans, Europe's dependence on U.S. coal will remain "shocking."

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