DON'T WANT TO FIGHT

The coal industry's national reference tribunal has upheld the miners' union's view that five individual extra days off, granted by the Wilberforce inquiry last year, do not constitute a third week's holiday.

Right-wing union leaders hope the ruling will pave the way for the National Coal to the it Pay-and-conditions Board to add the extra week package it offering the miners in a bid to stave off a threat of strike action.

It is by no means certain, however, that the Tories will allow this. A strict interpretation of their Phase Two state pay controls would only allow consolidation of the five days into a third week's holiday. the reference tribunal is overruled, the right-wingers could be faced with considerable pressure for action.

But there are other straws in the wind which demand ruthless examination of the leadership's reluctance to confront the state pay laws.

Chief among these are the continuing discussions about a productivity deal in the pits, on which the NCB is laying much stress in a bid to split the miners.

The Wilberforce report of 12 months ago recommended that such a deal be made by September of last year, 'based on increases in productivity nationally or by individual pits or by a combination of the two'. An NCB-union working party was set in March. By Yaly 1972, when the National Union of Mineworkers held its annual conference, union president joe Gormley was talking about deal giving miners periodic bonuses as productivity rose.

Many workers in the industry were already involved in double, triple and even multiple shift working, he said.

It was inevitable that the Coal Board would want to extend such practices to get the maximum benefit from mechanization. 'We must find ways of encouraging the men to accept this fact.

And the NUM chief went on to make clear that he saw such schemes as . means 'to increase the real value of wages instead of having to rely on an annual confrontaDiscussions in private This argument was backed up with the implied threat that if the miners pushed too blackmail effect.

In November it is believed, the union executive was informed of proposals for a two-stage deal which would give the NCB round-the-clock working in several pits. This was to be in return for fair shares' remuneration schemes similar to that practised in the The Post Office system operates on the basis that each time speed-up forces a worker out of his job, the rest of the labour force gets a cut. Union leaders are still trying to increase the size of their cut to 50 per cent.

These vicious proposals were larded with lot of leftsounding, but essentially corporatist nonsense about establishing 'special committees at all levels for the purpose of achieving fair shares and controlling other factors'.

Such committees, a working party report to the executive claimed, 'would return some working initiative down the trade union structure'.

A further report - dating from just a few days before publication of the Tories' Coal Industry Bill in Decemberwent even further.

committees could remove any suspicion that either side sought advantage at the expense of the other, it commented cynically.

The report went on to describe plans for bonus scheme, from which fines would be deducted bad attenyears' shameless robbery of nationalized coal and for last year's Tory refusal to settle entirely justified wage demands.

It would sell out the miners' struggle over years to get rid of area differentials.

Walker's talk of re-establishing viability is a Tory fraud because there are two very good reasons why miners cannot be held responsible for last year's £118m loss in the industry.

First there is the crippling burden of interest, on • loans floated to compensate the old coal-owners and to buy machines from the lucrative non-nationalized mining machinery industry. Over the last ten years the interest burden has been running at an average of £37.5m a year.

Secondly there is the £157m cost of last year's Tory attack on the miners.

Neither of these reasons can be laid at the miners' door. Rather they pose the question: why is the NUM leadership not fighting for workers' control of the pits, and for the nationalization without compensation of the machine manutacturing industry, coal distribution, the finance houses and the banks?

And why are these same union chiefs trying to avoid a fight—in unity with the rest of the trade union movement —to force the Tory government out of office and replace it with a Labour government which would carry out these policies?