Productivity Change in the Coal Industry and the New Industrial Relations
| Published date | 01 March 1989 |
| Author | Ray Richardson,Stephen Wood |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1989.tb00207.x |
| Date | 01 March 1989 |
British Journal
of
lndustriaf Relations
27:l
March
1989
0007-1080 $3.00
Productivity Change in the Coal
Industry and the
New
Industrial
Relations
Ray Richardson* and Stephen
Wood**
By the beginning of
1986,
stories began to appear in the national press of
very large increases in labour productivity that had occurred in the British
coal industry following the end of the year-long miners' dispute early in
1985.
A
standard measure of labour productivity in the coal industry is
tons
of
saleable coal per man shift
(OMS),
where a man shift
is
a shift
worked by any worker, face worker and non-faceworker alike. By defini-
tion, workers who are absent
from
work
or
who are on strike are
ex-
cluded from this measure. In September
1983,
before the start of the
overtime ban which preceded the strike, the average
OMS
for the indus-
try was
2.44
tonnes. Two years later it had risen to
2.71
tonnes, a gain of
11
per cent; this was only six months after the end
of
the strike, a time
when many had thought the industry would still be recovering from its
adverse production consequences. In
1986/7,
OMS averaged
3.29
tonnes,
35
per cent higher than in
1982J3;
by March
1987
it was
up
yet again, to a
record level of
3.76
tonnes, more than
50
per cent higher than before the
strike.
In a dramatic and concentrated form these productivity gains resemble
those which typify much
of
British manufacturing industry in the
1980s,
where there has been
a
widespread and striking rise in productivity relative
to the long term trend. It should be stressed that we are using the term
productivity here
to
mean output per unit labour input, not factor
productivity as a whole; still less does it mean efficiency. Our main purpose
in this paper is to shed some light
on
these startlingly large increases in
labour productivity
in
the British coal mining industry. In addition, we wish
to link the developments in the coal industry with those elsewhere in the
economy with an
eye
to contributing to the debate on whether
UK
industrial
relations have entered a new era in the
1980s.
"Reader
in
Industrial Relations, London School
of
Economics.
**Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, London School
of
Econohics.
34
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
PRODUCTIVITY CHANGE IN THE COAL INDUSTRY
Why did labour productivity rise
so
fast after the mining dispute? One
answer is to focus on the arithmetic effect of pit closures. If, before
closure, there were three pits of equal size, two with an
OMS
of
5
tonnes
and one with an
OMS
of only 2 tonnes, the average
OMS
for the industry
would be 4 tonnes (5+5+2 divided by 3). If the third pit were closed,
‘cutting
off
the tail’, the industry average would rise
to
5
tonnes
(5+5
divided by 2), an apparent productivity rise
of
25 per cent. Here the
‘industry’ is more productive but nothing has changed in the surviving
pits.
There is no doubt that some effect
of
this kind has been at work in the coal
mining industry. There were 170 collieries in operation before the strike
started in early 1984. One year after the strike had finished there were only
133,
although some
of
this fall came from pit mergers rather than closures.
By the end of the 1986/7 financial year there were only
110.
Productivity, or a
more general performance indicator, was obviously a major criterion when
deciding which pits to close down after the strike. It may not, however, have
been the only one at work. There is, for example, a conjecture that behind
the area distribution
of
closures was the management wish that they should
be heaviest in the more militant or more pro-Scargill districts. Certainly,
South Wales and Yorkshire together provided no less than two-thirds
of
the
closures during this period; the number
of
pits in Yorkshire fell from fifty-
three in March 1983 to thirty-six in March 1987, while those in South Wales
went down from twenty-eight to fourteen. But within any area it certainly
seems to be the case that the pits to be closed down tended to be among the
poorest performers.
It must be remembered, however, that there has been a history
of
pit
closures since the end
of
the 194Os, although the pace
of
the rundown has
varied. There were 901 pits in 1950,698 in 1960,292 in 1970 and 211 in 1980.
There has therefore always been an arithmetic effect at work on the trend in
labour productivity. The rate of closures after the strike has been somewhat
higher than it was immediately before, but not by
so
much as to explain more
than a relatively small part
of
the dramatic rise in the industry’s
OMS
after
1984.
The obvious response to the problem of the arithmetic effect is to
concentrate on the surviving pits, comparing their current productivity with
the corresponding levels before the strike. We have done this
for
a
single
British Coal area, that
of
South Yorkshire. The present South Yorkshire
area
is
an amalgam
of
the
old,
pre-strike South Yorkshire and Doncaster
areas. Before the strike, there were some twenty-five pits in these two areas
(plus some other facilities, the Orgreave coke works, for example
-
this
paper concentrates
on
the pits and ignores these other facilities throughout).
By the end
of
1986, following a number
of
closures and amalgamations, the
number
of
pits was down to nineteen, and one was publicly scheduled for
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