The proposal by UK Coal would include compulsory nine-hour shifts, 12-hour night shifts, work on weekends, and an increase in the pit’s operating schedule from 95 to 145 hours a week. At the picket line Chris Kitchen, the Kellingley branch secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), told Militant reporters, “We know if we accept these changes they’ll come back for more—this is just the start of it.”

Kitchen explained that the longer hours pose safety problems, because many of the miners travel long distances from other areas where pits have been closed. He recalled that four years ago two miners had been killed in a head-on collision during their two-hour drive home to Wigan, Lancashire. They had been pressured to work a 12-hour nightshift. Others among the 35 pickets said the bosses had sped the work up dramatically since they had begun working there 20 years earlier. New, faster machinery meant more dust, they said, and longer hours would mean more exposure to the dust. Workers noted that only a few weeks earlier one miner had been diagnosed with black lung disease (pneumoconiosis).

UK Coal representatives have said the longer hours will allow them to provide jobs for 240 of the 2,000 miners they will force out of work when they close the three pits at the nearby Selby mine complex.

The NUM had a different proposal to provide jobs for the laid-off miners, said Kitchen, who noted that miners would be happy for the Selby miners to join them. Rather than extend the hours, the union proposed that a new coal face be opened at Kellingley. One miner also told us that the gangs were short of labor and could do with reinforcements. Kitchen said the Kellingley miners had pushed back a previous attempt by UK Coal to force through its “flexible working” demands. At that time the bosses had said the longer hours would provide jobs for miners from the closed Prince of Wales pit in nearby Pontefract.“We knew this was a hollow victory—we knew they’d come back for more,” he said.

The union secretary pointed out that UK Coal had forced miners in Maltby, another Yorkshire pit, to swallow the new conditions under threat of losing their jobs. According to a March 10 BBC report, the NUM has suspended a series of further 24-hour strikes at other UK Coal pits while it seeks a High Court injunction against the company.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home