Productivity Change in the Coal Industry and the New Industrial Relations

Abstract

By the beginning of 1986, stories began to appear in the national press of very large increases in labour productivity that had occurred in the British coal industry following the end of the year-long miners' dispute early in 1985. A standard measure of labour productivity in the coal industry is tons of saleable coal per man shift (OMS), where a man shift is a shift worked by any worker, face worker and non-faceworker alike. By definition, workers who are absent from work or who are on strike are excluded from this measure. In September 1983, before the start of the overtime ban which preceded the strike, the average OMS for the industry was 2.44 tonnes. Two years later it had risen to 2.71 tonnes, a gain of 11 per cent; this was only six months after the end of the strike, a time when many had thought the industry would still be recovering from its adverse production consequences. In 1986/7, OMS averaged 3.29 tonnes, 35 per cent higher than in 1982J3; by March 1987 it was up yet again, to a record level of 3.76 tonnes, more than 50 per cent higher than before the strike. In a dramatic and concentrated form these productivity gains resemble those which typify much of British manufacturing industry in the 1980s, where there has been a widespread and striking rise in productivity relative to the long term trend. It should be stressed that we are using the term productivity here to mean output per unit labour input, not factor productivity as a whole; still less does it mean efficiency. Our main purpose in this paper is to shed some light on these startlingly large increases in labour productivity in the British coal mining industry. In addition, we wish to link the developments in the coal industry with those elsewhere in the economy with an eye to contributing to the debate on whether UK industrial relations have entered a new era in the 1980s.