EUROPE: Coal Is the Tyrant

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U.S. coal is flooding into Bremen, Rotterdam and other European ports at the rate of 4,000,000 tons a month. In one way, it does more harm than good: to fill its coal scuttles with costly U.S. coal, Europe is emptying its bank vaults of precious U.S. dollars which could be more profitably invested in new mining machinery. Moreover, sky-high U.S. coal prices have sent all other prices soaring.

Getting It Dug. The U.S. Mutual Security Agency has one word for Europe's coal situation: "Shocking." Most of Europe's economic problems could be solved by a 5% increase in European coal production. There is plenty of coal in the ground: South Wales alone has known reserves of 10 billion tons, enough to last several centuries. The problem is: how to get it dug.

What is stopping the diggers? Each nation has its own explanation. Britain is short of labor: nothing the nationalized coal industry has done (e.g., higher wages, social security) can induce more Britons to work in the pits. Full employment is partly to blame: coal miners' sons don't want to work underground when there are safer, cleaner jobs above.

Last year, the Labor government tried to import 5,000 unemployed Italians to work in the pits (70,000 could be used). For every miners' lodge that agreed to take Italians, four turned thumbs down. In one area, 93 out of 100 pits refused to have "foreigners." So far, only 600 Italians are at work.

West Germany has abundant labor (1,300,000 unemployed), but output per man shift is 30% lower than it was prewar. A fourth of the Ruhr miners' homes were destroyed during the war. Today one in every ten miners is forced to leave his family in some other part of Germany, while he lives in a barn or an old air-raid shelter near the pits. At the Zollverein mine, near Essen, 1,500 homeless miners live in bleak, clapboard cabins sprawling in the shadow of the pithead. The turnover among them is immense. "They don't budge in winter," said a mine official. "But when the spring comes round, you see a look in their eye, and one day they're gone."

In Belgium, after watching miners struggling to push loaded coal cars over an uneven tunnel floor, a West Virginia mining engineer named Neil Robinson offered to slash production costs from $14 to $11 a ton—if given a free hand. The skeptical Belgians agreed; Robinson has since set to work injecting U.S. zest and know-how into one of Belgium's oldest and deepest pits—the Good Hope Mine. If he succeeds, and the chances are that he will, MSA hopes to use the "Robinson Experiment" to spark similar coalface production drives throughout Western Europe.