‘Seven Shillings is Not Exactly the Millennium’: Economic Liberalism and the Campaign for a Miners' Minimum Wage in the Durham Coalfield to 1914

Mates, Lewis

doi:10.3828/hsir.2013.34.3

‘Seven Shillings is Not Exactly the Millennium’: Economic Liberalism and the Campaign for a Miners' Minimum Wage in the Durham Coalfield to 1914

Mates, Lewis

Authors

Dr Lewis Mates lewis.mates@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

Abstract

The Durham Miners’ Association (DMA) was one of the best established, wealthiest and largest trade unions in Britain. Yet economic liberalism, specifically that miners’ wages had to be determined by coal prices, dominated the thinking of the DMA’s leaders as well as many ordinary Durham miners. The minimum wage was an indispensable way for radicals to attack these notions. As the Liberal-dominated Durham leadership remained hostile, the task of winning converts to the minimum wage fell to the union’s radical activists. This article explores the rank and file movements that coalesced around advocacy of the minimum wage from their re-emergence in summer 1911, and considers the debates on the votes for national strike action on the issue in 1912. It charts the campaigns’ changing aims, achievements and weaknesses after the minimum wage was formally won.

Citation

Mates, L. (2013). ‘Seven Shillings is Not Exactly the Millennium’: Economic Liberalism and the Campaign for a Miners' Minimum Wage in the Durham Coalfield to 1914. Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 34(1), 49-81. https://doi.org/10.3828/hsir.2013.34.3

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	2013
Deposit Date	Aug 20, 2019
Publicly Available Date	Sep 10, 2021
Journal	Historical Studies in Industrial Relations
Print ISSN	1362-1572
Electronic ISSN	2049-4459
Publisher	Liverpool University Press
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	34
Issue	1
Pages	49-81
DOI	https://doi.org/10.3828/hsir.2013.34.3