SKINNING THE NUM TIGER

John Lloyd on the efforts of Ian MacGregor and his pit managers of the Coal Board to destroy the power of the union

ON THE walls of his colliery, pickets had written: `Bulmer is a bastard.' He went along one night with a can of paint and changed the slogan to read: `Bulmer is a good-looking bastard.' Even less charit- ably, they had written: `Bulmer is dead.' Nothing deterred, he took out the can of paint once more and emended: `Bulmer is dead right.'

That was managing a pit during the strike. Doug Bulmer was manager of Den- by Grange, a little it in Barnsley, the strike's epicentre. He got death threats and bomb threats as a routine occurrence. He saw his men arrested and carted away in police vans. One day, coming out of the pit, he saw a lad he knew handcuffed to a rail running down the roof of a police transit. He called to him: 'Art tha' waving to me, lad?"F... off,' said the picket. When they returned to work at Denby Grange, the strikers came marching back in behind a car in which a tape played martial music. One of the pickets had a child's policeman's hat on. He said: 'We Come back wi' our heads held high.' Bulmer said: 'By the look o' thee, lad, it's the only thing tha's had held high for months.' Everyone laughed. In Lancashire, managers worked all night to cut away a heavy metal gate which pickets were using as a battering ram on coaches bringing in striking miners. In North Derbyshire, they created a 'war room' on which the movements of working miners were plotted in meticulous detail. All over the British coalfields, managers who had played it by the book for decades tore up the book and played it by ear. National Coal Board management is more proletarian than most. Many were miners who made it up the ladder. All have had a spell down the pit, as all policemen have been on the beat. The yardstick of their respect among their peers is nerve particularly in facing down the miners' union branch committee and in comman- ding the respect of the men. In the pit, managers walk about carrying a light cane. The men call them gaffer, or boss, or sir. The relationships are hierar- chical, based on the need to take and give orders and to trust each other. On the surface, this closeness fractures: the union dominates and organises the miners' con- tact with the management: they meet in committees round battered tables in the noisy, grimy pit-top buildings and protest, review, take note, agree or register failure to agree.

Pit managers may be called boss, but they must obey the 1946 Coal Industry Nationalisation Act, the Mines and Quar- ries Act (1954), the Mines and Quarries (Tips) Act (1969), the Mines Management Act (1971) and the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974). Subordinate legislation includes more then 40 regulations, orders and rules. Like sea captains, they are vested with large amounts of statutory authority. They are directly and personally responsible for the safety of every person on the pit. Some are crushed by the responsibility: managers whose pits have sustained a mining disaster have them- selves been permanently and severely dam- aged, fit for no other work.

These are the men who won the 1984/85 miners' strike, whom Arthur Scargill, was- pish in his rage, demanded be sacked by a future Labour Government for waging war on the miners. They did wage war on the militant miners: they did cajole back, then protect (as best they could) those who ran the gauntlets of the picket lines to ask for their protection as the strike turned long and sour; they did exult in the downfall of Scargill, tell scurrilous stories about him, attempt to reduce him to ordinary size.

What are they doing with their victory? It varies: but, prodded by their bosses, they are seeking to maximise their position. They are, years after other industries, adopting 'modern management' techni- ques: modern management techniques mean ignoring, as far as possible, trade unions. The managers who once spent their time carefully working through union structures to send messages down the line through elected representatives are now organising direct management-to-men meetings on the pit-head where informa- tion once vouchsafed only to the union officials is communicated directly to the lads. To make time for this new approach, the sessions with the branch committees have been cut back: in many pits, branch committee men find that the time off work they used to enjoy making the case for their members has been cut back or has disappeared: often, only the lodge secret- ary is allowed time off, and that limited.

The old veto over shift patterns enjoyed by the branch has been replaced in many pits by management fiat. When the lads check in a few minutes late for the early shift (late is 5.40 a.m. rather than 5.30 — think of crouching beside a screaming coal-shearer in a hot pit at that hour) they are sent home unpaid, not nodded tolerantly in.

In many pits, management had given up managing and had confined itself to keeping the show on the road. The power enjoyed by the NUM meant that joint control governed most relationships, but no one had the real initiative. Now, those who can still take the initiative have done so: the NUM has retreated to wait for better times.

Which may not come for a while. The miners will not charge the guns again soon.

The NCB must seize its chance to cut back hard on unprofitable pits if it is to succeed in meeting the targets set by the most recent Coal Industry Act (June 1985) which prescribes profitability two years hence. There are 170,000 miners now: there may not be many more than 100,000 by 1990.

The numbers would matter little to the union's industrial strength if they had unity — the goal which the formation of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1944 had been thought to have gained. Now that seems gone: Arthur Scargill's ambition to lead a revolutionary force wrecked itself on East Midlands reformism, on a Labour tradition which has accommodated itself to capitalism and prized ballot based demo- cracy as a check on just these leaders' ambitions. The imposition of tighter, more centralised rules through the annual con- ference vote earlier this month has been enough to make Notts show its heels with Leicestershire, South Derbyshire and others likely to follow.

Ian MacGregor, the Board chairman, sees this as good. The most ideological of our state industry gaffers, a free enterprise- democracy man to his bones, MacGregor wholly approves of every split and rift, every act of renunciation of the union, every spit in the eye for the NUM lead- ership which had led him a weary dance through the negotiating chambers for month after month.

He has retreated from the harsh beam of light which pinned him into rigid Calvinist attitudes throughout the strike, caricatur- ing him as at once eccentric and soulless. In truth, his main problem as a public figure was his failure as a hypocrite: where he thought persons or institutions were opposed to him (as he thought rather easily) he was unable to disguise his hostil- ity. At the same time, he was easily swayed by his subordinates and his advisers, which meant the line was neither consistently hard or consistently soft: it had Peter Walker, the 'wet' Energy Secretary who was often much drier than the Board Chairman, tearing his hair.

He has been consistent in this, though: he has waged war on those within his management ranks who still cleaved to the old style (as he would see it) of manage- ment which emphasised procedure and consensus and operated through commit- tees and long drinking sessions with the NUM and other union officials. Where managers like the late Geoffrey Kirk, formerly head of press relations, and Ned Smith, formerly director of industrial rela- tions, respected and even revered some of the NUM leaders (Kirk, in a retirement speech, said of Will Paynter, the 'Com- munist' former NUM secretary who died last year: 'I loved that man'), MacGregor saw them as a bunch of reds, who did not and could not represent their men. He was refreshingly free of much of the cloying romanticism which surrounds such people (in a post-strike interview with Graham Turner of the Telegraph, he referred to the Smith school of managers as 'romantics') — but it remains an open question whether or not his estimation that the generally left-wing leaders of the NUM 'represent' their members is right.

MacGregor survived the strike and saw it won: his managers, many of whom disliked his appointment and dislike him still, stayed loyal and worked hard to beat the NUM, less out of loyalty to the chairman as out of having no other 'ole to go to. Scargill had made a class war out of it, and they were after all the managerial class, no matter what their origins: further, many of them saw themselves as fighting to preserve the industry itself, even if they had qualms as to what kind of industry it might be.

The NCB is the last of the Morrisonian monoliths which preserved a Morrisonian culture — a pro-public ownership reflex, a guaranteed place for the unions, an emph- asis on production rather than the market, a penchant for planning. In appointing MacGregor to its chair, Nigel Lawson (then Energy Secretary) chose a man whose every instinct screamed against that culture, but whose isolation within the industry initially forced him to skin the old tiger claw by claw.

In this effort, he has been greatly aided by the strike: where a corporatist union leadership allied to a similarly inclined management could have encircled the new chairman and reduced him to impotence or marginal gains, the catharsis of the strike has done much of his work for him. A split union means that one of his most produc tive areas is open to a separate pay deal and pay restructuring. The adversarial spirit engendered in management by the strike remains in post-strike attitudes. The weakness of the NUM allows rationalisa- tion to proceed apace. 'I'm a hoary old bastard who likes to win,' said the chair- man before the strike. Right on all counts.

John Lloyd is industrial editor of the Financial Times