COAL MINING.

In 1912–1913 the European coal industry reached its peak. At that time coal was the unchallenged energy supply not only for heavy industry and transportation but also for public and domestic heating. In Great Britain coal represented 95 percent of total energy consumption and was also used to produce electricity and gas. Coal mining remained a labor-intensive activity based on a male labor force. The United Kingdom alone counted more than one million coal miners before World War I, the most important group of workers (10 percent of the country's male labor) both in numbers and in trade union power. Coal mining was also a major industry in France, Belgium, Germany (Ruhr, Saarland), Poland (Upper Silesia), the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ukraine (Donetsk).

FROM UNCHALLENGED POSITION TO STRUCTURAL DECLINE

The history of coal mining in twentieth-century Western Europe contrasts with that of Eastern Europe and the United States. After World War I coal output in Western Europe entered a long phase of stagnation and, after a period of recovery from 1945 to 1958, a structural decline. For instance, Great Britain produced 292 million tons in 1913 (a level it would never reach again), 245 million in 1930, 220 in 1950, 128 in 1975, and 50 million in 1996. The picture is the same for all other Western European countries. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, output continued to increase after World War I. Poland, the largest producer except for the Soviet Union, produced 32 million tons in 1920, 38 in 1930, 78 in 1950, 172 in 1975, and still 137 million in 1997.

In Western Europe coal mining suffered from a slowdown of demand because of technological improvements to reduce energy consumption in heavy industry and transportation as well as the growing competition of American coal on the international market. While Great Britain was the major coal exporter in the world in the late nineteenth century, the United States took the lead in the 1920s. Moreover, on the European continent itself British coal had to struggle with the growing export of cheap, high-quality coal from Poland. The British coal position also was challenged by France and Germany. The collieries of Nord-Pasde-Calais that suffered heavy damage in the war were modernized in a major program of reconstruction. French coal output increased from 41 million tons in 1913 to 55 in 1930 and reached its peak in 1958 with 60 million tons. The recovery of German coal mining after World War I was even more impressive thanks to the efforts of cartels such as the Rhenish-Westphalian. German coal mining was mechanized: in the Ruhr 66 percent of coal output was cut by machines in 1926 as against 22 percent in Britain. The German output increased from 118 million tons in 1924 (after the occupation of the Ruhr) to 188 million tons in 1939. Finally, during the interwar period new coalfields were opened, such as the Campine in Belgium, and Dutch coal mining expanded rapidly (Dutch production was only 2 million tons in 1913 but reached 14 million in 1937). Meanwhile American and Polish coal mining were concentrated in large concessions big enough to invest in mechanization, while most of the collieries in Western Europe were still too small, fragmented in innumerable concessions (areas of land granted by governments to mining companies) dating from the mid-nineteenth century.

The stagnation of demand in the 1920s made clear the fact that West European coal mining suffered from an excess of capacity, insufficient productivity, and too much expensive coal. With the economic crisis of the 1930s its precarious position grew still worse except in the German Reich. British output fell from 262 million tons in 1929 to 210 in 1933.

Miners, however, remained a strong group able to paralyze a country by strike actions. The labor-intensive character of coal-mining operations encouraged miners' trade unions to fight for social provisions, higher wages (such as the British minimum wage legislation of 1912), better working conditions, and reduction of working hours per day (the British Coal Mines Regulation Act of 1908, known as the "Eight Hours Act"). With a very high level of trade union participation, unions were well placed to apply pressure to industrial affairs. Owners also were organized, in associations such as the Mining Association of Great Britain. The coal industry was thus characterized by repeated miners' strikes. In Great Britain the movement culminated with the strike and lockout of 1926. Though the strike ended in defeat for the miners, the sector did not recover. Many other actions were taken by coal miners' trade unions in the Weimar Republic, Belgium, and France. At the same time, coal increasingly became the source of political and even military intervention: the Ruhr coalfields were occupied by French and Belgian troops in 1923 to force Germany to pay war reparations.

World War II and its aftermath, reconstruction, created such a huge demand for coal that it provoked, as Régine Perron has written, the "myth of scarcity," in which Jean Monnet (one of the founding fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community, or ECSC) and others warned that Western Europe would suffer deeply from a shortage of coal in the following decades. Therefore the goal was to increase output and improve productivity as quickly as possible. A "battle for coal" ensued in 1945–1946, especially in Belgium and France. In the first years of the ECSC the High Authority continued to encourage production, but the energy market was dramatically changing due to the competition of cheap, abundant coal from the United States and Poland and, after 1958, the challenge of oil and natural gas, which remained low-cost until 1974. (Civil nuclear energy remained a marginal supplier until the 1970s). Drastic changes in the energy market were not peculiar to Europe; between 1950 and 1970 the world's energy consumption is estimated to have tripled. Even with increased energy consumption, however, the production of coal declined in Europe because coal was too expensive and oil increasingly competitive.

In 1958–1959 the demand for coal fell, paving the way for the structural decline of coal mining in Western Europe. In the short term (1958–1960), many companies had to struggle with increasing stocks and excessive capacities. In the long run, restructuring the entire sector became a priority: closing unprofitable collieries, concentrating production on larger concessions (as in Campine in Belgium), accelerating mechanization, improving the quality of the product, and finally, reducing the number of coal miners. This meant the disappearance of an enormous occupational class, with its know-how, its strike tradition, its own culture. For instance, the 1.1 million coal miners Great Britain counted in 1913 fell to 700,000 in 1945, 300,000 in 1975, and fewer than 11,000 in 2000.

From the early 1960s onward all the countries of Western Europe adopted national planning, supported by the High Authority of the ECSC, to reduce and even to stop coal mining. Indeed, since World War II coal mining had been under state control as a strategic sector. In Great Britain the nationalization of the sector (already envisaged by the Coal Mines Act of 1930) became effective in 1947 with the creation of the National Coal Board. France nationalized the coal industry by the law of 17 May 1946 and the creation of Charbonnages de France. In the Netherlands coal mining was under state control from the beginning, while in Belgium private companies were placed under strict state control after 1959.

In the 1980s, after some attempt to maintain production during the oil crisis, the exhaustion of most of the coalfields, more severe safety regulations, and new environmental protections made European coal too expensive in comparison with coal imported from China or South Africa. In the early 1970s the Netherlands was the first to decide to close down its coal-mining operations; the last colliery was closed in 1992 in Belgium, after social conflicts of great violence, then in 1994 in Portugal and 2005 in France. While Germany has not yet made the decision to close its last pits as of 2006, Great Britain is engaged in a drastic reorganization of its coal-mining industry. Spain, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania also have started to reduce the number of collieries.

MODERNIZATION AND MECHANIZATION

The fact that coal mining was a sector in decline in Western Europe does not imply obsolete technology. On the contrary, since the end of World War II the idea was to increase productivity by closing mines that were not suitable for mechanization and to modernize the most profitable ones.

The traditional system of work organization to cut coal at the coal face was the room-and-pillar system that was used in coalfields presenting disturbed geological configuration. However, the longwall method, imported from the United States, was used in England (Yorkshire, Lancashire) and later in countries such as Poland, where the coal seam permitted it. The advantage was that the longwall method permitted the mechanization of coal cutting. American mechanical coal cutters with loaders were introduced into the Midlands in 1936.

However, this method was inappropriate for most of the coal mines on the Continent (except in Poland) due to geological constraints. Consequently coal cutting had to bedone by hand with pneumatic picks. In the Ruhr however, mechanical coal cutters were developed during World War II. The German face conveyor or armored flexible conveyor became one of the key inventions of modern mining and by the 1960s it had been installed on all major longwall faces in Britain.

Safety conditions were greatly improved by the introduction of the powered roof support in the mid-1960s and by new techniques in tunneling and shaft sinking. However, one of the most important improvements of the twentieth century was electrification. After the 1902 international exhibition in Düsseldorf, electricity not only revolutionized coal mining itself (with electric headlamps for miners and fixed lighting in the galleries) but ushered in the age of the coal-fired power station.

Modernization and the closure of obsolete coal mines dramatically increased productivity (see table 1). Increased productivity also resulted from improvement in safety conditions, especially after the tragedy of Courrières (Nord-Pas-de-Calais) in 1906, which cost the lives of eleven hundred miners.

COAL MINING AND MIGRANT WORKERS

Coal mining companies had always been confronted with the difficulties of recruiting and keeping workers. This problem became severe after World War I, when miners and other young workers deserted the collieries for healthier and better-paid occupations. Consequently the companies had to recruit foreign workers, usually on a temporary basis (guest workers). In France the first Italians were accommodated in the basin of Briey in 1905. After the war they were followed by Poles and Czechs. In the small coalfield of Albi, Czechs and Poles account for 40 percent of the manpower of the miners in 1925. They flowed especially into Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Recruitment of foreign workers increased dramatically after World War II. The coalfields of Europe became a multiethnic society formed by people who shared the same occupational know-how and who forged a local culture that had no equivalent in other industries or other places. However, in Europe, coal miners are now part of history, not of the future.

See alsoGeneral Strike (Britain); Industrial Capitalism; Strikes; Trade Unions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashworth, William. The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. 5: 1946–1982: The Nationalized Industry. Oxford, U.K., 1986.

Leboutte, René. Vie et mort des bassins industriels en Europe, 1750–2000. Paris, 1997.

Michel, Joël. La mine: Une histoire européenne. In La Documentation française, bimestriel no. 8010. Paris, 1999.

Perron, Régine. Le marché du charbon, un enjeu entre l'Europe et les Etats-Unis de 1945 à 1958. Paris, 1996.

Supple, Barry. The History of the British Coal Industry. Vol. 4: 1913–1946: The Political Economy of Decline. Oxford, U.K., 1987.

RenÉ Leboutte