Special case : Social justice and miners

No recent industrial dispute has caught the nation's attention as the miners' did. Its immediate problems are formally resolved, but the background and wider implications of the dispute must now be absorbed into our industrial relations system.

The case for the miners may have been 'special' because it was overwhelming. But it was also special because it brought together many of the critical and unresolved elements in modern industrial relations. It exposed clearly and in detail the plight of the low-paid public employee caught in the poverty trap of minimal wages and crippling taxes. It brought out, also, the inadequacies of the machinery for his protection and for the improvement of his condition that our society, with its impulse towards the easier option of oppression, provides.

This account of the case that the NUM made to the Wilberforce Inquiry has been edited by John Hughes, the head of the Trade Union Research Unit at Oxford which helped to build up the miners' case, and by his colleague Roy Moore. A Special Case? makes clear their view that the Wilberforce Report is an important point of departure to a more rational and human planning of industrial development.