ABSTRACT
The mining industry is the only great industry in which there operates the principle of the sharing of profits between employers and employed. It is of little use, however, having profit-sharing if there are no profits to share. Off and on, this has been the position of the mining industry since the scheme was initiated. Wages and profits, even when shared, can only come out of the proceeds of the industry, and the selling price of coal has been so low, during the period that the system has operated, that there has been no margin worth speaking of between the costs of production and the proceeds to divide in the agreed proportions. Wages, for the past few years, have thus become almost stabilized, and stabilized, in the case of the lowest-paid workmen, on a scale which, when short time is worked, means real hardship and privation. In the case of the better-paid workers the wages paid compare favourably with those paid in other industries, and when measured by that standard, or the cost of living index figure, are not inadequate for the maintenance of a reasonable standard of life, but even in their case are not sufficient when short time has to be worked. A full week’s work in the pits means either five and half or six shifts per week. If all the workers in the industry were 116fully and regularly employed on this basis they would not be so badly off, except for the subsistence-wage men and the men engaged in the uneconomic pits which ought to be closed down, but are artificially kept alive, and in which the seams are so thin, or the working conditions in other respects so difficult, that it is not possible for the piece workers to make a decent living, and they drop back on to the minimum, with possibly the added hardship of short time.
