The Miners' Tough Choice

The meeting room upstairs at the Ollerton colliery welfare building in the Nottingham-Midlands coal field looked like a converted high school gymnasium. After an hour and a half downstairs of lager and bitter at a small communal bar, the miners filed into the room, noisy and nervous. Pea green was the color in vogue and woolen socks topped off waterlogged boots. A few sport jackets, an occasional tie, and two or three old brown frayed Stetsons dotted the crowd.

An electric apprehension filled the room as Joe Whelan, a member of the National Union of Mineworkers (N.U.M.) national executive, rose to speak. "As far as I'm concerned," he began, "I'm preachin' to the converted. But let us pray: O Lord above, send down a dove, and on his wings place razors, to cut the throats of those nasty blokes, who cut down miners' wages."

Like Whelan's gallows humor, the mood was black last week in Nottingham. Along with the rest of Britain's 270,000 mineworkers from Scotland to South Wales, they cast ballots on whether to go on a strike that could throw the country into chaos. The outcome will not be known until this week, but the confrontation between the miners and the government has already been joined.

Both sides were preparing for the worst. While union locals were laying away food and provisions for their members, N.U.M. leaders mapped plans to picket power stations, docks and railyards in an effort to halt other union-run industries. Movement of pickets will be coordinated from a strike center in London. Huge sheets will be draped across railroad bridges near power stations, informing train engineers: "This is the picket line. Please do not cross."

The government quietly organized tough contingency plans of its own, including a new centralized intelligence unit and mobile police flying squads. It was also considering whether to revive the old Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 in order to impose long prison sentences on disruptive pickets. In a television interview, Prime Minister Edward Heath talked of asking Parliament to deny Social Security benefits to wives and children of strikers.

The political rhetoric escalated as well. N.U.M. Vice President Michael McGahey, a Scottish union militant and a Communist, told a rally that if troops were used, "I would appeal to them to assist the miners." Heath seized on the statement as evidence that McGahey was trying to bring down his government. The Labor Party leaped into the fray with a statement repudiating "any attempt by Communists or others to use the miners as a political battering ram." Then, to a burst of cheers from Labor benches in Parliament, Opposition Leader Harold Wilson declared that "the extremists in the situation are the vice president of the N.U.M. [McGahey] and Mr. Heath." The heated exchange caused a flurry of partisan name calling but hardly helped solve the miners' problem.

Pocket Pride. A strike vote, with all its divisive and debilitating effects, was precisely what National Union of Mineworkers President Joe Gormley and other moderate union leaders had hoped to avoid. Instead, as the government's opposition mounted, so did the miners' mood to stick to their demands --even with the knowledge that to get their way a strike would have to be long. Coal stocks were still plentiful, meaning that for a strike to be effective it would have to last at least a month. The miners, already drained by twelve weeks of lost overtime, representing almost a third of their weekly income, were hardly in a position to suffer greater pay losses.

Yet there was little doubt last week that the vote from the coal fields would approve a strike. On a visit to Nottingham near legendary Sherwood Forest, TIME'S Skip Gates found emotions running high. "I'll tell you why they'll vote to strike," declared Mrs. Maggie Johnson, a miner's wife for 43 years. "They talk about mechanization--well, the foul air's still there, the dust's still there, the dank's still there. It used to be the miners put their pride in their pockets --they had to, didn't they? But there was a hole in that pocket big as your fist. They've taken their pride out of their pockets now. That's why they'll vote for a strike--because they've got to keep the union alive." Strike leaflets phrased the issue thus: "Vote yes for the union. No is a vote for Ted Heath."

The big battle in the Nottingham coal fields was being waged over miners for whom the strike will be a huge financial loss--"those who live from Friday to Friday, up to their bloody eyeballs in debt," as Joe Whelan puts it. Even the oldest red brick row house in Nottingham has a television antenna on its roof, wall-to-wall carpeting, and an automobile parked out front, all bought on "hire purchase," as the British call the installment plan. "With mortgages, with hire purchase, we can't afford a strike," says Marge Reid, whose husband has been a miner for 25 years. "Nobody wants to harm the country either, but if we have to do this to raise our standard of living, then we will."

"Little Lads." Nonetheless, many of those in debt as well as surface workers, power workers, and clerical staff will vote no. "How can I live on nothing at all?" asks Jack Chapman, a clerical worker at the Gedling pit for 22 years. "I'm not cutting my own throat." But most of Britain's colliers, the ones who dig out the coal day after day for 30 and 40 years, will vote, even reluctantly, with their union. "They thought we'd go back to work like little lads," says Whelan. "But Ted Heath stumbled into something bigger than his dignity."

Since the miners first refused to work overtime last November, the stakes in the government-labor standoff have gradually risen on both sides. For Heath, determined to preserve his anti-inflationary wage guidelines against the miners' demands for what the government claims is a 30% pay boost, it has meant a series of unpopular emergency measures, including a compulsory three-day work week, power cuts, rising unemployment and an economic slowdown. For the miners it has meant an unhappy choice between giving in to the government or digging in for a long, crippling siege that will bring irreparable wage losses and national chaos.

At week's end there was one slender hope for an eleventh-hour settlement. Reversing an earlier decision, Heath set a new meeting for this week with the Trades Union Congress, which represents 10 million workers, and the Confederation of British Industry, Britain's largest manufacturers' association. He has asked them to consider a possible compromise based on a "pay relativities" study just issued by the National Pay Board. The study provides for a public inquiry board to recommend wage boosts on the basis of working conditions and the national importance of the industry. Under such criteria, the miners would have a good case. Their jobs are both dangerous and necessary, and yet they earn less (as little as $57 weekly) than a London secretary, who averages $92. Yet both sides have become so unyielding, it is questionable whether a compromise can be worked out before the executive committee of the union sets a strike date. The committee has already said that may be as early as the end of this week.

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