Letters and Papers Concerning the Trans-Persian Railway and Other Railways in Persia [‎183v] (366/442)

303
Coal Mines
304
[LORDS]
{Northumberland) Bill.
anybody that your Lordships’ House was
not a competent Assembly to discuss this
particular kind of labour question as much
as any other. It is clearly not for me to
join in any appeal to the noble Lord
opposite not to press his measure. Any
such appeal coming from this Bench would
probably cause the noble Lord to persevere
with greater vigour and determination in
pressing it.
Lord WILLOUGHBY DE BROKE:
Why ?
The Marquess of CREWE : But I
should like to put this to him, that if he
does press his Bill to a Division and obtains,
as I think is evident from the course of
the debate, only a very small support, some
of those who are his backers on this parti
cular subject would adopt a tone which I
am sure would be exceedingly painful for
the noble Lord himself—namely, that of
implying that this House, composed en
tirely, or almost entirely, of capitalists
and consequently not in sympathy with
the working classes, had shown their usual
line of conduct in refusing to adopt the
purely humane measure of the noble
Lord.
I have very little to say on the sub
ject of the Bill itself. The Eight
Hours Act and the effect of that Act
in particular upon the counties of North
umberland and Durham—all this has been
described by former speakers of great
experience, including the noble Marquess
on the Front Bench opposite, Lord
Londonderry. It is, of course, important
to know that in this Bill the noble Lord
and his friends do not specifically ask
for a return to the time before the passing
of that enactment, when, as we all know,
there were two shifts in Northumberland
with the longer shift, the bridging shift,
which was abolished by the eight hours
enactment. The arguments in favour of
this measure seem to hinge mainly on the
discomfort which is caused by the three-
shift system and apparently on a desire to
abolish night work in coal mines altogether.
Well, that would be, as Lord Crawford
said, a very considerable revolution in this
industry. I do not see myself that the lot
of those who work underground at night is
in itself a harder one than that of the
great number of people in other industries
—the large number of people, for instance,
The Marquess of Crewe.
in the railway service—who are employed
at hours when people who are able to
order their lives as they choose naturally
prefer to take their rest. I can hardly
imagine, therefore, that the mining
industry as a whole is likely to press for
the abolition of work underground at
night.
There is one exceedingly hard case, so
far as I know the only really hard case,
which has arisen under the introduction of
the three-shift system into these two
counties. That is the case where members
of a household, say a father and two sons—
which forms, as we know, a not uncommon
combination of labour—where a family so
composed and all working in the pit are
set to work in different shifts. That is
an obvious inconvenience to the house
hold to which they belong ; but we are
told, and I believe it to be true, that
every effort is made by the management
to avoid this. Every effort is made where
members of the same household work in
the same pit to see that they work also in
the same shift; and if that particular
grievance, which I think by care and
management can be removed in all cases,
is dealt with, I think the main grievance
would disappear.
But apart from the particular points
involved in this Bill, the main reason
which would have deterred me from sup
porting any Bill of this kind brought in in
this way is this—and it has already been
clearly stated by the noble Marquess,
Lord Londonderry, and also by Lord
Crawford —namely, that there is no
industry so far as I know in the whole
country in which the habit of conference
and communication between the different
sets of people engaged in the industry is
carried out to such perfection as it is in the
mining industry. That being so, it ought
only to be when conference and com
munication and all possible patience has
been exercised that Parliament should
step in with a drastic measure of this
kind. For that reason alone, apart from
the particular merits of the case, I should
not have been able to support the noble
Lord, the excellence of whose intentions
in bringing in this measure I fully admit.
I could not have supported the introduction
of a measure of this kind until I knew that
all other methods of arriving at a settle
ment and removing any grievances that
were found to exist had been exhausted