COLLIERY RESULTS AND CLOSURES AFTER THE 1984–85 COAL DISPUTE
| Author | Andrew Glyn |
| Date | 01 May 1988 |
| Published date | 01 May 1988 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1988.mp50002004.x |
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 50,2 (1988)
0305-9049 $3.00
COLLIERY RESULTS AND CLOSURES AF'IER
THE 1984-85 COAL DISPU'I'E
Andrew Glyn *
At the heart of the 1984-85 miners' strike was the issue of the closure of so-
called uneconomic pits. The Report and Accounts of British Coal for
1985-86 noted that '27 collieries ceased production during the year repre-
senting an annual capacity of around 9 million tonnes'. It also recorded that
productivity was 21.5 per cent above the (pre-strike) 1983-84 level. This
paper uses the operating results of the collieries to analyse the impact of this
closure programme and other post-strike developments on the pattern of
productivity, costs and profits. Attention is confined to 1985-86 in order to
isolate as sharply as possible the immediate impact of the outcome of the
dispute, which is generally recognized as one of the most important in recent
times. Important changes have continued within the industry and so a final
balance sheet on the results of the strike cannot yet be drawn up.
I. THE DATA
The NCB's operating results, made available to the NUM, provides monthly
data on production, employment, operating costs and profits for each pit.
From this it is straightforward to calculate productivity (output per worker)
and proceeds per tonne (the sum of costs per tonne and profits per tonne). In
order to compare results before and after the dispute we have used the results
for the first 30 weeks of the year 1983-84 and the final 39 weeks of the year
1985-86. The first period (called '1983' from now on) is immediately prior
to the overtime ban which affected production before the strike began; the
second period (called '1985') begins nearly four months after the end of the
strike by which time the majority of the production problems arising from the
dispute were probably overcome.
In order to carry out the comparison it was necessary to construct the
matched list of pits which were producing both in 1983 and in the middle of
1986. All 32 pits closed before August 1986 were excluded as comprising
the immediate post-strike closure programme, even though they operated
during part or even all o1 1985. Amalgamations during the year 1985-86
were dealt with by combining the results for 1983 so as to make them corn-
* Thanks to Gillian McNamara for carrying out the very heavy load of computing involved in
this paper, to the National Union of Mineworkers for supplying the data and to Wendy Carlin,
Dave Feikert, Ben Fine and Bill Robinson for their comments and suggestions.
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