Back to "Them and Us"

COAL is the soul of Easington, a mining town of 10,000 on the North Sea coast of England, best known throughout the British Isles as the scene of a 1951 colliery disaster in which 85 men died. For four generations, Easington miners have been bequeathing their picks to their sons. The town was founded in 1911, when the first shaft of the Easington Colliery was sunk into the rich coal seams that lace County Durham. The tunneling now extends for miles in all directions. To reach the end of the most distant coal face, which extends 51 miles offshore beneath the North Sea, the miners must ride and walk--and sometimes crawl --through the black holes and seeping brine for more than an hour. D. H. Lawrence described their kind of life in Sons and Lovers in 1913: "And there is a sort of shadow over all, women and children and men, because money will be short at the end of the week."

It still is. For their dark, cramped and arduous job, Easington's miners are paid an average of $65 a week. What infuriates them is that this is less than they earned in 1954, when they agreed to shift from a piecework basis of pay to a standard rate on the promise that, in the long run, the change would increase their earnings and lighten their work load. Instead it deprived them of reward for their increased productivity, and their income declined from $17 to $19 a day in 1954 to about $13 today. In relation to other basic tradesmen in Britain, the miners dropped from third place in wages to twelfth in ten years. Ever since the Heath government came to power two years ago, the miners' wages have not kept up with increases in taxes, rents and social service contributions--let alone the rising cost of food and other goods.

The miners' grievances have a bitter twist; many date their ills from the nationalization of the mines in 1946, a goal that the workers had sought for generations. At that time, the men who ran the Coal Board, aiming to keep coal competitive with oil and atomic power, began to modernize the industry--and cut the work force from 750,000 men to the present 283,000. Always the Coal Board had the last word, with the power of the government behind it. "Ever since nationalization," said a middle-aged miner in the Easington Colliery Club last week, "they've been threatening to close the colliery if we didn't accept their terms. Now it's time to stand and fight."

The shared hardships and sense of common injustice has bred an intense loyalty among the miners, even if they blame their union in part for letting their numbers, and their wages, decline. The miners live in tight communities of grimy, brick, colliery-owned apartments, which only recently were provided with indoor plumbing. The workers have their own traditions and brass bands, their own pneumoconiosis clinics--and a common dedication to left-wing politics. But never before have they been able to force their will upon the nation. When the men first threatened to strike, said Tom Nicholson, the secretary of the Easington branch of the miners' union, "it was just the miners versus Heath. Now it's the trade unions against the Tory government. It's getting back to 'them and us.' "

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