Margaret Thatcher Breaks the Will of the Coal Miners Union

Previously published in Examiner

Part 19 of the Margaret Thatcher series

This series will now look at the only female prime minister of England and the only female prime minister of Canada. The series will end with three male governors of Quebec, so important to Montreal men and women's history and the three female governor generals of Canada. Two of the three females came from Montreal.

To learn more about Canadian Prime Ministers and other Canadian or Quebec politics, both McGill University and Concordia University in Montreal offer wonderful political science degrees, that you may want to look into.

For further reading, Montreal's Concordia University has a wonderful women's studies program at the Simone do Beauvoir Institute

Margaret Thatcher Strong and powerful Icon for the Status of Women, in Britain, USA, Canada and Montreal, though her policies were not necessarily pro feminist.

The Powerful Coal Miners Union

Thatcher's government closed 25 unprofitable pits in 1985, by 1992 the numbers rose to 97 and eventually the existing ones were sold off and privatized after Thatcher had already resigned. The future would lead to 150 collieries closed down when some were still turning a profit. These horrendous closures put ten's of thousands of people out of work and destroyed the economies of entire communities.

These were trying times for the miners and as a result of their will being broken, trade union membership across the board declined. In 1979 the trade union membership was set at 13.5 million, and by the time Thatcher was through with the strikers the membership plummeted to 10 million by 1990, when she left office. Thatcher had succeeded in defeating the trade unions on the backs of her own people.

Privatization

A key component of Thatcherism as it has been called, was the move toward privatization. The sale of public utilities rose after Margaret Thatcher's 1983 election. She raised over '£29 billion from national industry sales and an additional '£18 billion from the sale of council houses (public housing).

It has been said that the move toward privatization improved the British economy and workforce performance and productivity under her leadership though it is not clear just how it did it. Andrew Glyn a Marxist economists believes that privatizing industry did not improve upon what was called the "productivity miracle." Instead it was the smaller workforce within the industries along with increasing unemployment which did it. Less workers will work harder to keep the jobs they have.

Source

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher