ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have focused on how the issue of dust disease in coal mining was given increasing attention from the 1930s, and undeniably the dust control and improved compensation measures had some ameliorative impact. Nationalisation made a real difference. It is significant that all of our oral interview respondents who expressed a view on this commented that nationalisation brought improved health and safety standards in the pits. The NCB and the Mines Inspectorate were emphatic that such strategies were successful in controlling dust. However, as we will see, the preventative policies of the NCB and the regulators – such as the dust datum and the notion of ‘approved faces’, together with the employment of a small army of dust suppression officers and medical professionals to monitor respiratory disease and keep mine dust within prescribed legal limits – were only effective to a degree. The degenerative pressures of an intensely productionist managerial regime and a deeply entrenched machismo work culture where miners rationalised (and were inured to) high risk-taking at the point of production circumvented the reformist zeal of the newly established NCB, the regulators and the unions in militant coal fields like South Wales. The acceleration of the colliery closure programme from the mid-1950s introduced further pressures upon the workforce and mine management, influencing tough choices that had to be made between the economic viability of pits and workers’ health and well-being. Such economic pressures seeped subtly into miners’ consciousness. Customary deeply entrenched ways of working and of managing labour in the pits did not disappear overnight, whilst job security, wage maintenance and protection of the traditional provider role understandably took precedence over uncertain and poorly defined risks of respiratory damage some time in the (relatively distant) future. Moreover, the evidence strongly suggests that a considerable gulf continued to exist between NCB action and statutory controls, and actual workplace practice, especially deep underground, at the coal face, far away from the scrutiny of the regulators. Here, oral evidence is of particular value, helping us to reconstruct a largely lost world of work culture, attitudes and prevailing practice at the point of coal production.
