Note 14 — Chapter I · OUR DAILY BREAD
Reading edition
The present writer declines to join in the condemnation of British miners for reduced output. In an ultimate sense (which is no part of the present discussion) the decline in effort of the miner is perhaps justified. But the facts are none the less striking as showing how great the difference of output can be. Figures given by Sir John Cadman, President of the Institute of Mining Engineers a short time ago (and quoted in the Fortnightly Review for Oct. 1920.), show that in 1916 the coal production per person employed in the United Kingdom was 263 tons, as against 731 tons in the United States. In 1918 the former amounted to 236 tons, and during 1919 it sank to 197½ tons. In 1913 the coal produced per man per day in this country was 0.98 tons, and in America it was 3.91 tons for bituminous coal and 2.19 tons for anthracite. In 1918 the British output figure was 0.80 tons, and the American 3.77 tons for bituminous coal and 2.27 for anthracite. Measured by their daily output, a single American miner does just as much work as do five Englishmen.
The inferiority in production is, of course, ‘to some considerable extent’ due to the fact that the most easily workable deposits in England are becoming exhausted, while the United States can most easily draw on their most prolific and most easily workable sites....
It is the fact that in our new and favourable coalfields, such as the South Yorkshire area, the men working under the most favourable modern conditions and in new mines where the face is near the shaft, do not obtain as much coal per man employed, as that got by the miners in the country generally under the conditions appertaining forty and fifty years ago.