IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/woemps/v10y1996i1p57-84.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Foreign Fuel, Foreign Ships and Disorganised Trade Unionism: An Alternative Interpretation of the Defeat of the Miners in 1984-5

Author

Listed:
  • Tony Lane

    (University of Liverpool)

Abstract

The defeat of the miners' strike has been variously attributed to the role of the state, inappropriate and ill-conceived tactics used by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and bureaucratic trade union practices. Through a detailed analysis of the magnitude of fuel imports and how they were organised, this paper argues that the strike was defeated by the ability of the major energy users to substitute without hindrance imported coal and oil for domestically-produced coal. It is further argued that if the NUM had been well-organised it would have been able to predict the evasive logistics of the energy users and adjusted its tactics. The organisational defects of the NUM are seen as a manifestation of structured organisational inadequacies in British trade unions.

Suggested Citation

  • Tony Lane, 1996. "Foreign Fuel, Foreign Ships and Disorganised Trade Unionism: An Alternative Interpretation of the Defeat of the Miners in 1984-5," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 10(1), pages 57-84, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:woemps:v:10:y:1996:i:1:p:57-84
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://wes.sagepub.com/content/10/1/57.abstract
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:woemps:v:10:y:1996:i:1:p:57-84. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.britsoc.co.uk/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.