20 Hour Work Week

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah, and they spent as much of the winter as they could asleep, and with good reason.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

many subsistence economies long before our industrial or even civilized age(s) began had "work weeks" much shorter than 40 hours.  of course back then "work" and "life" were not separate spheres.

That is of course true. But what is to be done about it?

Thing is, no one actually wants to spend their winters shacked up with their relatives in a state of semi-hibernation. As was common in some places as recently as the first half of the nineteenth century, of course. Because that's the sort of thing that's the trade-off for hardly working most of the year (with brief periods of extreme activity). So even if you could do anything about, who would actually want to?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That was sort-of my point. If a 20-hr work week was a totally desirable thing then don't we still have it? (Waiting for the next Opebonomics lecture).

I thought as much, but 'what is to be done about it?' in that sort of context can be interpreted in different ways.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Define 'serf'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Define 'serf'.

It was obviously a rhetorical flourish, Al, but the essential point is I think valid - that the modern wage-slave has a rough equivalency in terms of 'freedom' to the medieval serf, and that the claims to the contrary we constantly hear from the Right are mostly deceptive and blatantly self-serving.

What do you know about Mediaeval serfdom?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

By the way, some folks on here are espousing socialist/communist ideas.

My pearls! My pearls! I must clutch my pearls!
 

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I don't have a car (or a driving licence) and am not an American, so... never.

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Don't you think that's a bit of an odd question to ask random strangers? Are you from the 1950s and on hunt for cottagers in order to prosecute them? In which case I'm going to have to disappoint you; I'm not really into that type of thing.

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That may just be an even stranger question. So strange, actually, that I have no sneering come-back line ready to throw at it. Bizarre. Are you on ketamine?

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Absolutely!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh dear. I'm afraid that... well... I think you just fell into what is technically called a...



...and a fairly easy one to avoid as well. Alas.

So let's see Britain go back to the days of subsidizing bottomless money pits such as paying hundreds of thousands of miners to dig holes in the ground looking for minerals that are no longer there because they have already been dug up? Do you really think it makes sense to take from productive sectors of the economy in the form of taxation and give it in the form of subsidization to numerous people so they can dig pointless holes, a job that produces nothing?

I'm not aware of that ever actually happening. The only thing that would seem to fit - and even then only vaguely - would be the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool, but they were hardly the product of any kind of socialism and certainly didn't involve hundreds of thousands of miners.

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I suppose this should have been dealt with earlier (I think we were too busy laughing at you) but 'socialists/communists' is kind of inaccurate as a sweeping term of any sort and you should probably avoid using it if you want to be taken at all seriously.

As for the bizarre business of 'inventions', then some things certainly were invented in the Soviet Union and I'm a little surprised that you'd think otherwise. You must have heard of the AK-47; quite the international success story, or so I am told.

Bureaucrats, of course, are not paid to 'invent' things, so I'm not sure why their apparent collective failure to do so ought to be held against them.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

You are not familiar with the history of the coal miners in Britain? If memory serves, over 200,000 miners were employed by the state in the late 1970s (And I believe only something like 10,000 were still around after privatization). It was no longer a profitable endeavor by the end of the 1970s. In fact, there was not a lot of coal leftover by the early 1980s, so basically the state was subsidizing the act of digging holes by hundreds of thousands of miners. In other words, the state was engaging in massive subsidization of an industry that was mostly producing nothing. Is this the type of future you want to see? Tax the productive to subsidize the pointless?

Oh, I think it's probably fair to say that I know a reasonable amount about the history of coal miners in Britain. Ask anyone here.

I'm going to avoid getting embroiled in a debate about the economics of the coal industry in the 1970s and 1980s because I'd need to dig through a couple of boxfiles worth of notes and photocopies and I'm not going to do that just to argue with some prick on the internet, but I think I should correct you on a couple of points. The first - and most important - is that you are completely wrong to suggest that coal had mostly run out by the early 1980s; the British coal industry was one of the most efficient and productive in Europe (the most, I think) and was at the time essential to the British economy as most power stations were still coal fired (the switch to natural gas didn't happen until the early 1990s and nuclear power was never as popular with policy makers as it was in, say, France), and most estimates in the early 1980s put Britain's provable coal reserves at about three hundred years or so (almost all of which is still down there). So... actually the state was subsidising keeping the lights on.

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I'm proud to call myself a Socialist, but I'm not a Communist. This should really not be an issue in 2011.

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Look, I am really not here to defend the U.S.S.R, an awful regime that I am not (and have never been) an admirer of. I'm also no expert when it comes to technology so it isn't as though I could rattle off lists of 'great inventions' even if I wanted to. Of course there were many cultural achievements within the Soviet Union, if that counts.

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I'm afraid that I don't, me duck. Sorry.

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And once again, and with all the regret that I can muster, I must post this picture:



Anyways, lay off the ketamine. It's not good for you.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The low hanging fruit was clearly gone by the early 1980s.

1880s, actually. In some places probably the 1780s. Most reserves were still quite easy to get to, even in the older coalfields (and would have been easier had the NCB actually invested money in modernising those pits, but that's a different debate).

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Those figures were commonly accepted at the time, so it isn't really a question of what I think. Of course much of the coal would be harder to get at now because of the pit closures and the inevitably flooding underground.

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Domestic demand for coal collapsed following (amongst other things) the 'dash for gas' in the early 1990s. But, for what it's worth, there are quite a few opencast pits around these days (they don't last for long and they don't employ many people, of course), and a new drift mine was opened near Neath a few years ago, and vague plans for larger projects elsewhere are proposed every now and again.

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I never said it was profitable, though some areas certainly were. But that it was an unusually efficient and productive coal industry is an established fact. The reason why no one 'threw gobs of capital' at the industry when it was privatised was because the market for coal had collapsed by that point.

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Numerous strikes? Bollocks.

During the strikes in the early 1970s the lights (rather famously!) did not stay on. During the strike in 1984/5 the lights stayed on because the government was prepared (massive stockpiles of coal outside every power station, months in advance of industrial action) and because Scargill was an idiot (the strike started in summer).

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This is a very strange discussion.

I still wonder why you've not actually responded to this image...



...and it's associated accusation. Despite it being used twice.

Odd.

Trolling? Or dense?

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Actually what started this bizarre conversation (such as is) was your failure to understand that my mocking response to your idiotic contribution to the thread (even more idiotic than opebo's, and that's saying something. Want a medal?) was... mocking and sarcastic. And it's continued because, well, this is the internet.

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Ah, I think you are trolling, yes? Maybe your contributions - such as they are - to this thread make sense now. Because I've already mentioned my distaste of the Soviet Union (how retro!) and I was careful to use the word 'within'... all of which means that I'm hardly saying that Shostakovich's eighth quartet (or whatever) is proof of the brilliance of the U.S.S.R. and why we should all miss it greatly.

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Think you'll find that the number of people who have a high opinion of North Korea can be counted on the fingers of one hard, so I don't think the surprise (or even mock surprise, if that's what it is) is at all warranted. So, probably, you're just trolling. Kind of pathetic as trolling goes though. Must try harder, as school report cards hardly ever actually said.

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lol

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Or, perhaps even more likely, the estimates of reserves were blown out of proportion in the 1980s in a desperate attempt to continue pushing for the policy of mass subsidization of an industry that should have never been subsidized to begin with?

That, I'm afraid, is the logic of the conspiracy theorist. The estimates were reached at by standard scientific means and were universally accepted at the time. It is quite possible that the figures were an overestimate (especially as many of the 'reserves' were extremely deep) and they certainly don't count as 'reserves' now, but that's not really the point. Coal was not running out in the 1980s; the industry was shut down for other reasons.

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Well that can't be done because it was in the 1990s that the bulk of what was left of the coal industry was destroyed.

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In the first place it must be pointed out that while demand for coal has been rising of late generally, domestic demand for coal in Britain is still a small fraction of what it was before the 'dash for gas'. There are relatively few coal fired power stations in Britain these days (nothing compared to what there used to be) and other industries use coal less than was once the case.

Secondly, I have already pointed out to you that there are now a large number of opencast works in Britain, many of which are very new and very large. A new drift mine was also opened near Neath recently and its owners reckon it should last for about twenty years. There are proposals to open a new deep pit at Margam to supply the Port Talbot steelworks (whether it'll actually get off the ground isn't the point; the point is that the coal is certainly there). There are also issues with cheaper imports, often from coal industries that are often (if not always directly) heavily subsidised. And then there's also the fact that much of the coal in Britain is far harder to access now (after the pit closures and the inevitable flooding and other issues underground) than it was during the 1980s - and that's actually a hilarious understatement.

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Yes, but I don't think you are listening. It was one of the most efficient and productive coal industries in Europe but, of course, it wasn't really profitable overall. Because that wasn't the point. I don't have the figures in front of me at the moment, but some areas certainly were consistently profitable (the ones with newer reserves, newer pits and modern machinery; Nottinghamshire for one).

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Untrue, as the case of the Tower Colliery at Hirwaun proves. Almost all collieries were closed long before they had to be, because hardly any collieries were closed because they had reached the end of their useful life. They were closed for other reasons; political in some cases (if we're being absolutely honest), economic in others.

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That is a really remarkable thing for someone to write. Do you want people to take you at all seriously?

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How is keeping the lights on a pointless activity? I hate to have to keep repeating myself, but... in Britain in the 1970s almost all electricity was produced at coal-fired power stations and they were dependent on the nationalised British coal industry. The coal industry was an essential part of the economy because of what it produced, not because of the amount of money that it made (or, rather, lost). It was only possible to destroy the coal industry - as the Thatcher and Major governments did - after setting up alternatives to coal (and alternatives to British coal at that). Why do you think that miners strikes were always so important back then? Because if there was no coal mined, then the lights would go out: which is what happened when Heath took on the NUM in the early 1970s.

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I'm not sure how that's relevant as almost all British coal was consumed domestically. Although the structure of the coal industry in WV changed a great deal during the same period, actually. Most of the big underground mines were shut and were replaced by opencast works, resulting in similar social catastrophe in parts of WV as in the British coalfields during the same period.

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Numerous implies that strikes were a regular occurrence. They weren't.

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What? Sorry, but that makes no sense whatsoever. In any case, I don't actually support central control of the economy. I merely pretended to in order to mock thee.

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You really are a prize buffoon.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

My God, but there's a lot of Fail in this thread. Not had a chance to read through the rest of the recent developments 'till now. Lord.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The figures were clearly an overestimate otherwise people would be exploiting the opportunity to get that coal out right now as we speak. Or perhaps you are right. In that case, I strongly suggest getting a group  of investors together, convincing them that you are right, and then exploiting the opportunity yourself.

I'm not sure if any of that has anything to do with the potential health of the coal industry in 1984.

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There are laws and other procedures in Britain that make mines relatively safe (though not, disgracefully, as relatively safe as they used to be under nationalisation). There is also the reality that workers in Britain expect to be paid more than a pittance, especially for skilled and dangerous work. These things make coal mined in Britain rather more expensive than coal mined in certain other places.

Most of the additional issues have been mentioned by me in other posts in this thread, and I don't see the point in repeating myself that often.

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Absurd and untrue. The British economy was dependent on coal long before the Attlee government nationalised the pits (which it did as a practical response to the failures of private ownership as much as for ideological and - hey it's the Labour Party - emotional reasons) as any fool knows. For most of the subsequent decades the only alternative in terms of electricity generation (especially given longstanding British preferences for energy independence) to British coal was nuclear power, and that was always controversial for obvious reasons.

The national miners union, by the way, was formed in the 1880s (as the MFGB), although it was remodeled along slightly less decentralised lines (as the NUM) in 1945.

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Managers, darling. They need to be protected from managers and management, not 'the public'. They have managers in the public sector just as much as in the private sector. In any case you should never find yourself asking 'why do miners need a union' because even in the public sector the fairly obvious needs for union representation in that particular occupation don't go away.

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lol

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ultimately, both salaried and non-salaried public employees work for the taxpayers since their services are paid for by the taxpayers. If management in the public sector is exploiting public workers, there are channels (i.e., the media) to bring this to the attention of the public so that necessary changes in management can be made through the proper political channels. In other words, there is no need for public unions on the grounds of "protection from management." Do you care to take another stab at defending the indefensible, though? This is fun!

You really are remarkably naive, me duck. But I get the impression that trying to enlighten you on this point would be a fruitless endeavour, so I don't think I'll bother.

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FDR had laughably patrician views on a wide range of subjects, so, you know. So what?

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So you acknowledge that they were actually mining rather than randomly digging tunnels for no good reason?

Excellent.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As I thought, no point even bothering.

Other than the 10,000 or so miners who are still employed in mining, the vast majority of the 200,000 or so miners who were employed by the state should not have been employed by the state to do what they were doing

Where do you get these figures from, exactly? Saying that only about 5% of miners in the early 1980s were actually employed in the mining industry is quite a claim, and not one that I've ever seen before. I am reasonably sure that everyone employed as a miner worked in the mining industry. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps they were all actually employed in call centres or spent their time in dole queues, just like their children would have to and still do.

Moreover, everyone employed by the NCB was employed by the state because the NCB was (of course) a nationalised concern. There were a couple of tiny private mines usually a long way from the main coalfields, but they employed hardly anyone. So the distinction that you make is not, in fact, any kind of distinction whatsoever.

I would strongly recommend that you drop this particular line of argument because you are beginning to embarrass yourself now.

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Once again, the point of the coal industry at that time was to produce fuel to be used by other sectors of the economy (especially electricity generation) rather than to produce a profit (even if doing so was, from the 1960s anyway, considered as something worth considering by the NCB). At the time there were no serious alternatives to the use of British coal in the power industry because energy independence was then the major plank of British energy policy (and had been for decades) which ruled out the heavy use of imported fuels, while cheap gas from the North Sea had yet to come fully on board (so to speak). Nuclear power, meanwhile, was always politically controversial and also lacked the enthusiastic support from the civil service that it had in (for example) France. So, as you can see, the coal industry was one of the most important parts of the economy, even if it tended to be less than entirely profitable because keeping the lights on and the factories operating is probably fairly important in a vaguely modern economy. The fact that the strike was lost in part because the government had been stockpiling coal for months tells its own story, don't you think?

Things are different now, of course. But that's not really relevant.