A greve dos mineiros britânicos

Quem costume seguir blogs britânicos, reparará que se está a falar muito da greve dos mineiros de há 25 anos atrás (p. ex, aqui ou aqui). Chris Dillow escreve sobre o assunto:

The miners were right

(...) But the miners’ claim did make some economic sense. The claim, as made by Andrew Glyn (though rarely by Scargill), was that the social costs of pit closure - the loss of tax revenues, the dole paid to miners, the loss of coal output and (I’d add) the loss of the call option on that output - outweighed the benefits. This is especially so as those benefits - the ending of losses on coal production - were overstated by some queer accounting by the NCB (p318 of this pdf).

And recent research strengthens this case. This paper (pdf) shows that, even 20 years after the pit closures began, only just over half the jobs lost had been offset by job creation in other industries - and many of these were subsidised by the tax-payer.

I suspect that recent events vindicate the miners in another sense. The motive for wanting to destroy the miners was based in part on a desire to reassert “managers‘ right to manage“, by crushing union power.

But the banking crisis shows us the dangers in giving bosses’ untrammelled power. Managers’ “right to manage” is not matched by a competence to do so. If in the 70s and 80s it was thought that unions were capable of destroying industries, the current crisis shows us that bosses are also capable of doing so.