PRESIDENT’S COLUMN

RMT helpline 0800 376 3706 :: may 2015 :: RMTnews I went down a coal mine for the first time in my life recently. It was quite an experience but also very sad. I was in Wakefield to address a meeting and Trevor Howard asked me if I wanted to visit the local pit which is now a museum. I have spent a lifetime attending miners’ galas, reading about their struggles, being inspired by them and speaking alongside them, so it was a great opportunity to get a feel for what their lives must have been like. We were accompanied by Leeds branch secretary John Stewart and retired branch secretary Pete Daniels. The tour started off with showing us how conditions were in early nineteenth century with whole families worked in the pits. The father would dig the coal, the mother would be behind him helping get the coal out of the seam and the children would be behind a door to the seam to open and shut it as the coal came through. Most of the time they would be sat in the dark as they had to buy their own equipment and candles were expensive. These children were often as young as five and worked extremely long hours. This was a truly horrific life to lead for all while deaths and accidents were very common. One of the things that hit home to me was just how little the owners valued human life. Our guide, a retired miner, explained how valuable the pit ponies were compared to human labour. Humans could be replaced easily, whereas the ponies were expensive to buy and maintain! Certainly the ponies seemed to be better thought off and better looked after than the human workforce. Things improved as time passed, but working in mines continued to be extremely dangerous. No matter how much actual working conditions improved, there were still constant dangers from gas, explosions etc. Still, the massive improvements brought it home just how effective the NUM was in winning better pay and conditions. Something, we should always remember, which was achieved by industrial struggle and led by some of the greatest trade union leaders in history such as AJ Cook, Arthur Scargill and Mick McGahey. The mining industry theme continued on my way back from the Scottish TUC in Ayr to the Engineering Grades Conference in Edinburgh. I was given a lift by Davie O’Donnell and Mick Hogg was also in the car and their knowledge of the history of industrial struggles in Scotland is phenomenal. We passed through Fife and saw many closed pits. Mick told me how the mine owners had it all sewn up. They owned the houses that the miners lived in as well as the shops and the pubs. This meant that when the miners got paid they were basically handing their wages back to the owners. What both these visits brought home to me was the loss of close communities as well as the huge job losses. The result is dead ghost towns, with communities having little or no hope. One of the worst phrases that I hear is “think yourself lucky that you have a job”. This makes me very angry. EVERYONE should be entitled to a job, health care, leisure time, and a decent pension at the end of their working lives. Our job as trade unionists is to fight to achieve that for all of our society. Finally, I want to wish Greg Hewitt all the best for the future in his retirement. He chaired his final engineering grades conference as he retires next year and it has been a privilege to know him as a comrade, and friend. Good luck Greg. Peter Pinkney DOWN THE MINE President’s column of the boys in the collision. So I asked after the driver and the Brummie told me the horrible fate of the man with contiguous stoicism in words I can only allude to here in print, for no man is an island, though his torment is no secret on the railway. Stoicism is a beautiful thing, all about dignity and pride. But it has its limits. You could see the way it hurt the man to talk this way, this concrete and ballast way of flesh and blood and sons of mothers. The Civils man loves his shovel, but the P-Way man loves his brother. You'll never hear about his brothers, not the dead ones nor the one who feels the burden of the guilt for their deaths. The public, with their weekends and white washes and trains to ride, they hear about the odd death on Crossrail or the railway in general, but they never hear about the men who take cancer from concrete dust. Never do they hear about those who die, knackered on the road when they've been 13 days on, and drive halfway across the country to wash their oranges in the hope of heading back the next day. Nor again do they hear about the crippled minds of the witnesses, the survivors, those builders of the future wrought in iron and too often turned in guilt to the industry of their own destruction. There are worse places to work than the railway. But in few industries is there such an architecture of oppression to keep the brothers from standing as brothers: anti-union laws, tax legislation, legal blacklisting. In few industries is such tremendous power vested in so few, who are treated with such cruelty and contempt for all that. One day we will rise, and we will capture, and we will govern the country, a monument to our labours and the labours of our dead, by new and different rules, us working folk, who built it all. But that day is a long way off yet, and it is a tired way, and a deadly way. Name withheld