Labour Productivity in the South Wales Steam‐Coal Industry, 1870–1914
HE purpose of this article is to examine and account for the fluctuations in the labour productivity of coalmining in South Wales between i870 and the outbreak of the First World War in I9I4. The portion of the South Wales coalfield with which it is primarily concerned extends from Pontypool on the eastern extremity of the coalfield to the Rhondda Fawr in the West, embracing that area famed for its bituminous house and semi-bituminous steam coals.' In general, historians have tended to treat labour productivity in the national context. But by concentrating on a single coalfield, it is possible to make a closer examination of the potential sources of changes in labour productivity.2 The variable conditions of working and mining practice, which differed from region to region, are minimized and data from additional sources of material, unique to the area, may be drawn upon. Although the concept of "productiveness" of labour received increasing attention from contemporary commentators in the coalfield, the only data that can be derived from official statistics relate to output per man year of those employed above or above and below ground at South Wales collieries. In consequence, any discussion of labour productivity is seriously handicapped by use of such crude global measurement of output and unit labour input, although the occasional survival of colliery paybooks enables us to make some observation of output over a shorter unit labour input, and in some cases of output per hewer's shift. It is the relative poverty of statistical data that poses the chief methodological difficulty in this article. Since the Annual Mines Inspectors' Reports and the subsequent Annual Statistical Tables do not distinguish between the various sections of the labour force, we must first establish the particular groups of workers to whom movements in productivity can be attributed. It will then be possible to discuss the factors which governed the overall labour productivity of coalmining in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This will be done in terms of the effects which these factors had on the respective groups of workers. As is to be expected,