British Miners Union Faces a Split : District’s Threatened Pullout Creates Tension and Ill Will

Old-timers holding up the bar in the smoke-filled pub across the street from the pit entrance remember the hard days when the union was weak and Butterley Mining Co. ran Ollerton and everyone in it.

Times are different now.

Today, the industry is government-owned and, through tough bargaining and bitter strikes, the union has won its men a good wage, liberal benefits and a big say in running the mines. Its officials dominate town life and help represent Ollerton on the district council.

The approximately 1,000 miners who live in the small, red-brick workers’ cottages that make up the town exude a strong sense of workers’ solidarity and union loyalty, feelings that still characterize much of working-class Britain.

“The union is a way of life in the community,” said Jimmy Hood, the burly former secretary of the Ollerton branch of the National Union of Mineworkers. “You can’t separate it.”

Confusing Tragedy

But separation is exactly what could come if the 30,000 miners of Nottinghamshire in central England follow the unsettling advice given by their regional leaders last month and vote to break away from the national union. A vote is scheduled for September.

For Ollerton and other mining communities of the Nottinghamshire coal fields, the decision seems to be part of a confusing tragedy that has shattered their valued social cohesion.

The potential breakaway from the national union by miners in the country’s highly profitable second-largest coal-producing area also carries far wider implications for Britain.

A split would severely weaken one of the country’s most powerful trade unions, sending ripples throughout organized labor. It could also create ticklish unity problems within the opposition Labor Party and enhance the feasibility of a Conservative government eventually returning profitable mines to private industry.

But the larger significance of these events has been eclipsed in Ollerton by the more immediate worry of community tension.

The issue of a split in the union, unthinkable 18 months ago, stems from the bitter, year-long miners’ strike that finally collapsed in defeat last March.

Miners in the Nottinghamshire region voted against joining the walkout, which was called by the union’s fiery president, Arthur Scargill, to block government plans to close older, unprofitable pits. The miners in the profitable Nottinghamshire coal fields felt that they had been steamrollered by Scargill’s strike call and had little sympathy with it.

Violence Erupted

Although the national union agreed to honor each region’s vote, pickets from other regions quickly descended on Nottinghamshire’s mines and violence soon erupted. In Ollerton, a striking miner from Yorkshire was killed trying to stop work at the pit.

As emotions boiled, relations between the region’s mining officials and their national counterparts deteriorated. When Nottinghamshire delegates to an annual conference were labeled scabs and lepers for failing to support the strike and then opposed moves to centralize the union’s power under Scargill, they walked out, determined to split.

The majority of Ollerton’s miners worked through the strike but some joined the national union’s cause in sympathy.

Such individual decisions to work or strike tore the fabric of the region’s mining communities. They split families, broke friendships, canceled weddings, turned neighbor against neighbor and triggered feuds that many believe will last lifetimes.

Now the question of splitting the union hangs over the Nottinghamshire coal fields like a dark cloud.

“We’re opening up the old wounds again,” said Brian Marshall, a veteran miner from a village just west of Ollerton. “There is bound to be trouble.”

Marshall is one of several miners serving on the area’s district council, a government body somewhat similar to an American city council with administrative responsibility for several Nottinghamshire mining towns.

Ollerton’s miners, who once stood together, remain divided as a result of the strike. Those who worked still drift toward the Roman Catholic Club, a church-run pub where off-shift miners can drink and find a game of dominoes. Those who went on strike gather at the Miner’s Welfare Institute half a mile away.

The issue of leaving the union has already accentuated these differences.

“From the minute the breakaway talk began, you heard people asking, ‘Why, why does this all have to happen to us?’ ” said the local Anglican minister, Dennis Hibbert. “This is bound to stir things even more.”

Dave Cruickshanks, the personable district council chairman and a miner at the nearby Clipstone pit, admitted that it has been hard keeping the issue from affecting government business.

Tensions Evident “We promised to keep the differences out of the council chambers, but it isn’t easy,” he said in a recent interview. With 29 of the council’s 46 members either miners or directly connected with the industry, his remarks appeared the height of understatement.

Even small decisions, such as granting a brief, informal interview to a visiting foreign reporter showed the tensions. One councilman invited to join the discussion sat down to chat amiably about why the union split was necessary, but a second, opposed to the division, declined to join in, and instead glowered at the group from a corner.

Cruickshanks himself voiced worries about the split.

“If they form a breakaway union, (Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher will pick this area off and privatize it (sell the mines back to private industry),” he predicted. “I started mining in 1946 when the industry was in private hands. I wouldn’t want to go back to that.”

At The Plough, the closest pub to the pit entrance, miners from both sides of the dispute congregate, but members of the two sides rarely drink together.

Talking over the decibels of Elvis Presley’s “Jail House Rock” and the raucousness of a payday night crowd, a cluster of seven men worried aloud that a divided union would threaten the hard-won gains made over the years.

“We got what we got by sticking together; union means unity,” argued Mick Lowe to the nods of those surrounding him. “If we split, we’re finished. They’ll pick us off one by one.”

As the evening drifted on, the seven talked of previous struggles now part of Ollerton’s lore. The strikes of ’72 and ’74 that ended in victory, the one in ’26 that didn’t, how the company kept the Labor Party out of town until the early ‘40s and how anyone running afoul of the company then was out of a job and out of his rented house by nightfall.

Others, however, believe that Britain’s coal mining future lies in the lucrative Nottinghamshire mines and that a breakaway union could win better concessions from the state-owned National Coal Board for those who work here.

At the regional mineworkers’ union office in the city of Mansfield, 10 miles southwest of here, the mood is optimistic, both about winning the miners’ mandate for the split in September and about the future of the new union that such a split would create.

“We’ve got the wealth, the membership and the will,” the region’s union treasurer, David Prendergast, said. “If you don’t carry this area, you can’t prevail in an industrial dispute. The future of coal in this country is right here.”

Substantive talks have already started with small groups of dissident miners in neighboring South Derbyshire and Leicestershire to build a new amalgamated union and Prendergast sees the day when the breakaway branch could eclipse the national in size.

“I’m not naive enough to say there will be no problems, but I’m confident that’s what will happen,” he concluded.

An initial meeting between the rebel miners and National Coal Board officials was reportedly conducted in a cordial atmosphere and there appears little doubt that the board would quickly grant recognition to a new union.

For the National Coal Board and the Thatcher government, the prospect of a divided union would remove one of the major stumbling blocks to its plans to streamline the industry by decentralizing its management, entering into potentially lucrative productivity agreements with unions in areas such as Nottinghamshire and, eventually, returning profitable mines to private industry.

The national union is strongly opposed to both privatization and decentralization.

“(The union split) could be the first and vital move in the creation of a wholly different structure for the coal industry,” the Times of London predicted in a recent editorial.

The possibility of a split has also placed Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock in a potentially embarrassing squeeze. If he denounces the split, he could endanger as many as 10 parliamentary seats in sensitive mining constituencies now held by his party. However, any encouragement of the breakaway would risk alienating far larger elements of organized labor.

Rebel Leaders Confident So far, Kinnock has spent much of his energies calling for reconciliation and unity.

Last May, the Nottinghamshire miners gave their leaders a thumping 73% majority to oppose efforts by the national union to centralize authority under the contentious Scargill, even if it meant expulsion. That support has made the rebel leaders confident that they will win the September vote.

However, recent decisions by both the Labor Party and the national Trades Union Congress that the rebels would not be allowed to have formal ties to either the party or the umbrella organization of British organized labor has had a sobering effect on many advocating independence.

“The fear of being branded as outcasts has brought a lot of apprehension,” remarked Alan Griffin, an industrial relations specialist at Nottingham University who lives in a small mining village just southwest of Ollerton. “The feeling that working people have to stay together is a powerful force.”