The 1921 Black Friday defeat halved miners’ wages within two years

Evidence

Indeed, with the industry sliding into permanent depression in the spring of 1921, miners lost most of the material gains they had obtained during the war, along with the increase in wages once guaranteed by the Sankey outcome. Th e miners’ strike that followed began on April 1, 1921, nominally to fi ght for a national wage; it represented the last heroic eff ort to counter declining living conditions. Th e strike went down in defeat, when on April 15 the leaders of the railway and transport unions decided to back away and left the miners on their own. Th is episode is famously known as Black Friday: the moment the British labor movement was forced onto the defensive. Later that year coal returned to interdistrict competition for business, and with it the full rigors of the private system. By 1922 the miners who were still at work were earning about half of what they earned in 1919; in just two years they saw a nominal weekly wage drop of 46 percent (Scholliers and Zamagni 1995, table A. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 416

Categorization

• XREF: Black Friday is the canonical interwar British labor defeat; worth noting against later Thatcher-era defeats. — connects to: The 1921 miners’ strike defeat cut miners’ wages by 46 percent — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 416

Broader Connections

• The 1921 miners’ strike defeat cut miners’ wages by 46 percent #corroborates (0.95) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 416