The industrial politics of disablement 163 5 THE INDUSTRIAL POLITICS OF DISABLEMENT In 1843, one year after Parliament had passed the landmark Mines and Collieries Act banning females and children under the age of 10 from working underground, Punch magazine printed a cartoon titled ‘Capital and Labour’ (Figure 4). Reflecting the magazine’s sympathy for the poor and downtrodden and the spirit of social justice that characterised its radical early years, the image contrasted the circumstances of those who grew rich from coalmining, the wealthy coal owners
This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015). 3 For key works in the comparative coalfield societies literature, see Stefan Berger, Andy Croll and Norman LaPorte (eds), Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Keith Gildart (eds), Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout: The Struggle for Dignity (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004); Stefan Berger, ‘Working-Class Culture and the Labour Movement in the South Wales and Ruhr Coalfields, 1850–2000: A Comparison’, Llafur, 8
becoming ‘disabled’, there were others for whom bodily impairment did not necessarily mean an end to their working lives. How did industrial expansion contribute to the incidence of injury, disease and impairment? What happened to those ‘disabled’ through accidents or disease during Britain’s Industrial Revolution? How did people with impairments negotiate changing welfare and medical regimes of assistance, and what was the place of disability in industrial politics? Did industrial change lead to increasing marginalisation of ‘disabled’ people and how receptive was the
illustrated. Yet disabled miners were involved more proactively in industrial politics, sometimes independently of trade unions, which might not always sympathise with their cause. Breaking terms of employment to escape unhealthy or dangerous collieries, seeking to supply shortages of labour during strikes, challenging colliery doctors, or fighting for compensation in the courtroom were all means by which disabled miners asserted themselves politically during this period. While this book has opened up new perspectives on disability in Britain’s coalfields, it points to the
communities and, as such, became an important organising principle as trade unions and the broader labour movement fashioned industrial relations campaigns and political strategies to deal with the issues that arose. Similarly, in the working-class literature of the twentieth century, class, industrial politics and disability are represented as intimately related. Histories of coalfield societies have tended to focus on political and industrial radicalism, but, arguably, a more radical historiography can derive from work that looks at the confluence of forces and discourses
130/465, Minute of meeting with the Executive Committee of the National Union of Seamen, 13 May 1966. CAB 130/465, Minute of meeting with the Finance and General Purposes Committee of the TUC, 14 June 1966; PREM 13/1228, Note of a meeting held at 10 Downing Street, 9 June 1966. J. McIlroy, ‘Note on the Communist Party and industrial politics’, in J. McIlroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell (eds), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Volume II (Aldershot, 1999), p. 241. T. Benn, Out of the Wilderness. Diaries, 1963–67 (1987), p. 436. PREM 13/1228, Note of a
be posed. Given the very real limitations of administrative capacities in a pre-industrial political context, a state’s abilities to rule bureaucratically over a large territory and population depended on encouraging positive relations between centre and locale. No political centre could command the coercive resources to impose constantly its will on its subjects. To be successful, a state had instead to offer some persuasive vision of good rule and implement policies that at least some of the time came close to achieving stated intentions. Local welfare needs
G. S. Bain (ed.), Industrial Relations in Britain (Oxford, 1983), pp. 5–11. 39 See, for example, R. Blackburn and A. Cockburn (eds), The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus (Harmondsworth, 1967). 40 C. Wrigley, ‘Trade unions, the government and the economy’, in T. Gourvish and A. O’Day (eds), Britain Since 1945 (1991), pp. 70–5; J. McIlroy and A. Campbell, ‘The high tide of trade unionism: mapping industrial politics, 1964–79’, in J. McIlroy, N. Fishman and A. Campbell (eds), British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics. Volume II (Aldershot
Page 115 115 Ensor, R. C. K. (ed.) (1904) Modern Socialism. As Set Forth by Socialists in Their Speeches, Writings and Programmes Hobsbawm, E. J. (1984) Worlds of Labour. Further Studies in the History of Labour Kelly, J. (1999) ‘Social democracy and anti-communism: Allan Flanders and British industrial relations in the early post-war period’, in Campbell, A. McIlroy, J. and Fishman, N. (eds) British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics, vol. 1: The Post-War Compromise, 1945–64, Aldershot McKibbin, R. (1990) The Ideologies of Class. Social Relations in Britain