The Moral Economy of the Scottish Industrial Community: new perspectives on the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike

"Jim Phillips, Department of Economic and Social History, University of Glasgow Literature on the origins of the 1984-5 miners’ strike in Britain is generally confined in its focus to peak level relations between the Conservative government, the National Coal Board (NCB) and the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), and the shifts in energy supply that decisively weakened the miners’ bargaining position. The high politics approach has tended also to narrow the geographical scope of the literature, which concentrates essentially on the divisions between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. Developments in the ‘marginal’ coalfields – Scotland, Durham and South Wales – tend to be relatively unexplored. The strike is usually depicted as being imposed, illegitimately, and without a national ballot, on the industry and the miners by the NUM leadership, which refused to accept the logic of the changes in energy supply and opposed any pit closures on economic grounds. This paper questions these received views, and develops a more rounded perspective on the origins of the strike, by examining the increasingly autocratic management of the industry in Scotland from 1982 to early 1984. In this context the strike is presented as a legitimate and roughly democratic trade union response to the NCB Scottish Area’s managerial style and strategy. It was not imposed externally on Scotland, via the ideological conflict between Conservative government and UK union leadership, but in fact developed much of its national – that is, UK-wide – logic from the conflict between management and workers in the Scottish coalfields. A number of pits were closed in Scotland from late in 1982 to early in 1984. The strategy of the NCB’s Scottish Area management involved ‘testing’ the supposed militancy of the miners in Scotland – evidenced in national ballots on pay offers in 1981 and 1982 – by making these closures and significant incursions on trade union responsibilities and privileges. Pits with relatively unproductive performance records were targeted, in line with the broad NCB position of responding to changes in energy supply by reducing production costs. New managers were introduced at these pits, the Scottish Area Director, Albert Wheeler, keen to disrupt established relations between colliery managers and union delegates, and a number of the latter were apparently victimised. Disputes were consequently provoked, sometimes where pre-shift emergency union meetings were called to discuss responses to managerial initiatives which contravened joint industrial procedures. Workers subsequently reporting for work a few minutes late were then refused entrance to their pit and sent home without pay. The incremental dissolution of the low level of ‘trust’ – as industrial relations scholars would term it – between management and employees, and the establishment instead of what could be called ‘no trust’ relations, was instrumental to the outbreak of the strike in March 1984, at which point roughly half of Scotland’s miners were already in dispute with local management. Details are drawn from the key closures – on economic grounds – of Kinneil in West Lothian in December 1982, and Cardowan in Lanarkshire in the summer of 1983, along with developments at Monktonhall in Midlothian, where there was a six-week lock-out in the autumn of 1983, at Polmaise in Stirlingshire, which was threatened with closure from December 1983, and Seafield in Central Fife. The Seafield case in particular demonstrates the various elements of managerial strategy. A new manager was appointed in May 1983, who recurrently sought to explain the colliery’s production performance in terms of the low diligence and high absenteeism of the workforce. Dismissals were threatened and in January 1984 joint industrial practices suspended by the manager. The resulting stoppage of work was still in place in March 1984, at which point – shaped by the closure of Polmaise but also by events at Seafield and elsewhere in Scotland – the Scottish Area of the NUM came out on official strike. This coincided with the start of the ‘rolling’ strike in Yorkshire that then spread across the English and Southern Welsh coalfields. From the perspective of management’s conscious quest for confrontation, and deliberate cultivation of ‘no trust’ relations, the strike, at least in Scotland, ought to be seen as the direct product of workplace conflict as well as the consequence of deteriorating peak level relations in the context of coal’s changing market. The paper utilises perspectives from management and industrial relations as well as historical literature. It examines the concept of trust, and, in arguing that the strike was generated internally in Scotland, explains the collective behaviour of the Scottish miners in terms of their ‘value rational’ orientation. It is based on NCB and NUM records and materials, Scottish Office and Department of Energy records, reports in the daily press, and participant memoirs and reminiscences."