WI:An alternative miners strike...

As part of my research to my Flower of Scotland tl, I found the example of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in 1971, when the company was refused a loan by the government, which would have driven them out of business, instead of declaring a strike, the union organised a 'work-in', whereby the workers stayed on site and carried on working. As a result, they gained public sympathy and the government was forced into a U-turn.

Now....

WI: When the Thatcher government announced the closure of 20 pits in 1984, instead of going on strike across the board, the NUM arranged it so that these particular 20 pits carried on mining whilst the other pits went on strike.

How would this affect the miners strike? My hunch is that this would force a back-down from the government...
 
I think it would require someone other than Scargill to be head of the NUM for something this clever. After all he did declare a strike without a ballot, and later went looking for money from Libya, both gifts to his opponents.

Why exactly would it cause a climb down from the government though? Maggie had made sure that there was two years worth of coal stockpiled, so the government can afford to ignore the miners at the twenty pits now working for free. All those miners are going to achieve, IMVHO, is to stockpile coal at those pits because it won't be going anywhere.

A work in might have saved some of those pits if the government and NUM were willing to compromise, but neither were. Scargill wanted to bring down Thatcher and Thatcher wanted to rein in the unions.

If the NUM had wanted to be really smart and its leadership really cared about the membership they'd have negotiated some sort of deal with the NCB that would have involved some sort of phased closure of uneconomic pits and a minimum of job losses.
Of course making the NUM, NCB and the Thatcher government engage in reasonable negotiations with each other is almost ASB.
 

hammo1j

Donor
I think the miners could have done better with anyone other than Scargill.

Scargill was an idealogue that believed in revolutionary communism and hence the enmity of Thatcher. Perhaps if Heath had won his who governs Britain? election then Scargill would have been replaced with someone more moderate who would have looked after the miners interests instead of turning them into a pre-revolutionary corps.
 
Why exactly would it cause a climb down from the government though?
Leaving aside the other points for a moment, I'll deal with this point first, if I may.

The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work in was to garner public sympathy and to show that the aim was to work, not that they were work-shy trade unionists on the skive(which is exactly how much of the Tory media presented the miners strike, ignoring the devastation), but men wishing to keep their jobs.

A strike would be expected. Pre-arranged arguments, both for and against would have been pre-prepared and delivered as such. By staging a work-in, they would effectively be screwing one of the governments PR weapons and garner far more sympathy than was garnered in otl.

As has been stated, Thatcher prepared and I suspect wanted the strike to destroy the unions and avenge '74 and if she hadn't have done she would never have appointed McGregor to the NCB. She could portray it as a faceless union, top-heavy dictating to the government with miners not working due to fear. A work-in would change this.

The miners would never win in a war of attrition. Who would win the publicity war would be key. This was the case with the Upper Clydeside, and the same applied with the miners. Had they done this, Thatcher would have to argue that over 25,000 men, who were so dedicated to their jobs that they were working through notice of closure should be thrown on the dole.

If you had combined this with a strike ballot for the other pits, then the Strike would have been difficult. Even the Nottinghamshire miners could possibly have been pulled on board. I agree, Scargill was the wrong man for the job, but the scale of the cutbacks imposed meant that a strike was inevitable anyway.

One thing Scargill did get right was the result of the strike should Thatcher win. I seriously doubt she would in this scenario. Also, if she fails, she would have to go. I think this may either mean a wet Tory or Kinnock winning in 84/85. Britain would still have heavy industry and powerful trade unions(although they may still be less powerful if the Tories manage to stay in)in this timeline.
 
As someone from Nottinghamshire, and somewhat of a militant thinker myself (although from a non-mining area and background) the Miner's Strike has always interested me. This thread is interesting in that most alternate miner's strike ideas suggest that either the strike lasted longer or was even more militant.
 
As a co-incidence, today, Jimmy Reid, the man who was behind the Upper-Clydeside Work in, died today.
 
I tried a similar paste earlier this year regarding the miners strike. The miners could have used different tactics including not confusing a strike of jobs with a pay claim which initially happened as far as the public were concerned and not trying to enforce a series of regional disputes nationally to circumvent the unions own rule book ob ballots.

Had they held fire and called a national strike ballot and temporarily curbed the flying pickets they may have got a yes vote although whether they would win was another matter. As others have pointed out there were problems with Scargill and his paranoia about loosing a ballot and lack of any compromise
 
Bump. No more thoughts? :(

Just one. You're ignoring the obvious difference between the pits and the Upper Clyde shipbuilders, which is that the pits are underground and the ship yards aren't. At some point the miners have to come to the surface, at which point it would be a relatively trivial job to prevent them going underground again. It doesn't even need to be a formal lockout, management could simply say that the conditions of a work in made it impossible to ensure the miner's safety underground (on which note it's worth bearing in mind that the first two pits to close were closed because they were unsafe, not because they were uneconomic).
 
I seem to recall from somewhere that some of the men responsible for safety and things like the pumps that kept water out of the mines, were in different unions. What happens if they decide not to back the work in?
A lock-out, or a closure on safety grounds, as suggested above, are also obvious solutions. I wonder how difficult it would be to cut off the electricity supply to the mines?

Unless someone other than Thatcher is PM, or her government is much weaker, I don't see the miners getting any sort of victory. IMVHO the government still holds most of the cards even with a work in.
 
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