July 26, 1918.

THE COLLIERY GUARDIAN.

175

Delivery, 17 tons 10 cwt. in 1 hour, 11,100 cu. ft.
of free air used.

Delivery, 11 tons 14 cwt. in 1 hour, 10,550 cu. ft.
of free air used.

Delivery, nil, conveyor working 7,920 cu. ft. of
free air used.

From the above figures it will be seen that power
costs run very high on conveying where the quantity
of coal produced is low, so that it is of the greatest
importance to see that haulage arrangements are good,
in order that the maximum output be obtained.

The length of each conveyor face is about 160 yards,
and the total length of the face is 1,300 yards. The
straightening of the faces has improved the roof con-
siderably and given a more even roof pressure, inas-
much that during the last few months fully 90 per cent,
of the timber has been withdrawn from the gobs. The
greater part of this timber is unbroken, and can be
used again. It is considered a great benefit to remove
this timber systematically and allow the roof to fall,
and so relieve the pressure of the face.

Stowing.

No rubbish is ever sent out of the pit; the whole
of the material from the making of the arches at the
pit bottom has all been stowed in the faces, and yet
there is insufficient rubbish to stow the faces. A system
of packs to protect the road, as used in the Midlands,
allowed of a better control of the roof than if the face
were filled. It is a distinct advantage to not fully
pack the face, and the withdrawal of all timber in
the gobs is an end which is most desirable to
accomplish in all cases.

The main principles to be followed if timber is to
be successfully withdrawn are: —

1.	The faces must be kept in a perfectly straight
line.

2.	All props must be withdrawn systematically, row
by row, as the new row is put in.

3.	Heavier props should be put in where they are
being withdrawn.

4.	The first few rows of props are the most difficult
to draw.

5.	If the face come in, it must be tried again, for
the fall will have relieved the pressure and will make
it easier to accomplish.

Since the timber has been withdrawn at Britannia,
much less trouble has been experienced with the roof.
Previously it was quite a common thing to have a
conveyor face stopped with a fall, but it is now a
rare occurrence, although the colliery is only working
75 per cent, time, owing to shortage of wagons.

One of the greatest difficulties of the conveyor
system is to give adequate clearance. For a large
output a double road must be kept at the conveyor
end; and at Britannia, at the commencement, a
double width road was carried on with the faces as
they advanced; this was not only very costly to make,
but the maintenance of these very wide roads at a
depth of 730 yards was a very heavy item. Various
methods were tried to overcome this difficulty, and
eventually the following arrangement was adopted.
Two single roads had been driven, 10 yards apart,
instead of one double road, and a conveyor is used
in the top road, to bring the coal back to the cross-
cut, where it discharges into the tram; the empties
are brought in through the top road, and are filled
under the conveyor, gravitated through the cross-cut
to the lower road, where they are taken away by the
rope. When the gate conveyor becomes too long it
will be cut off by another cross-cut and a new loading-
place arranged there, the haulage, of course, being
extended and the outer cross-cut done away with.

One of the advantages of the shaking conveyor over
other types is that rubbish can be brought into the
face with it, which is difficult with other types. A
thrower-off is used, which is simply a plough throwing
it off on the gob side at a desired point.

In order to deal with the larger quantities of
rubbish, which were produced in the making of the
pit bottom, some expeditious method of dealing with
it had to be devised. A very light tip plate was used
for tipping the rubbish on to the conveyor. It has
not been possible to get enough angle for the whole
of the material to run out on opening the tram door;
but this is not desirable,, as it would overload the
conveyor. After the door has been opened, the rubbish
is raked out, thus regulating the quantity. In many
cases conveyors have been put in for transporting
rubbish to the face conveyor to facilitate the disposal
of rubbish from certain points. These conveyors
generally lead from a double parting to avoid handling
trams a great distance. As many as 60 trams of
rubbish are tipped in a shift at one conveyor face.

With regard to safety of working on the conveyor
system, experience over ten years has proved that
there are less accidents in conveyor faces than in ordi-
nary stall work, and this is attributed to better super-
vision and systematic timbering.

The line of face which should be adopted will depend
on the seam and the roof over it. At Britannia the
faces are about half-course on the back or the face,
as the case may be, and generally this will be found
to be the best line where the roof is tender.

Action Concerning Subsidence and Flooding.—From
Monday to Friday, July 8-12, Mr. R. Lawrence, K.C.,
sitting as the deputy of the Chancellor in the Chancery
Court for the County Palatine of Lancaster at Liverpool,
was engaged in hearing an action relating to subsidence due
to underground working. The plaintiff was William
Woods, pottery and tile merchant, Sutton Oak, St. Helens,
and the defendants were Messrs. Bromilow Foster and
Company, colliery owners. It was explained that opera-
tions in the defendant’s collieries so altered the course
of Sutton Brook as to cause serious flooding of the
plaintiff’s property. The deeds showed that defendants
had the right to work the mines directly under Mr. Woods’
plot of land without responsibility for damage caused to
the surface, and the point now at issue was whether the
rights possessed by defendants exonerated them from
liability regarding the diversion of the brook and the con-
sequent flooding. His Honour reserved judgment.

CO-PARTNERSHIP.

At the annual meeting of the Society of Chemical
Industry in Bristol, on June 17, Mr. E. Walls opened
a discussion on Co-partnership. After recounting
some of the well-known principles of co-partnership,
he said that our present wages system was not so
much an evolved system as a patched-up one. Co-
partnership started from an entirely different point
of view. From the political standpoint it considered
industry as made for man, and not man for industry,
and on the scientific side it attempted to find a
rational formula for the division of the product of
the industry. Many considered this the sole, as it
was the prime, function of co-partnership, and that
a better name for it would be Profit Sharing. In
devising profit-sharing schemes, the gross earnings
of an industry were taken, and out of them were
ear-marked wages on labour and interest on capital.
The standard interest on capital was fixed by well-
known laws, and the standard wage on labour could
be similarly fixed in a scientific way by calculating
at any given time the money equivalent for a fixed
standard of living based on the index price of com-
modities. These two items should constitute prior
charges on every industrial undertaking. Further, in
every well-managed business there were other prior
charges for repairs of plant and buildings, depreciation,
and reserve for equalisation purposes, and these charges
were necessary for the protection of capital, which
otherwise would be constantly dissipated and lost. In
the same way labour should be protected, and there
should be—corresponding, to repairs, reserve, etc.—
a labour reserve for illness o$ invalidity and old age.
Further, just as the general reserve carried a business
through difficult times and equalised dividends, so
on the labour side there should be a general reserve
ear-marked for providing for the workers being out
of employment. There then remained the manner in
which the residuum would be dealt with. In that case
the Excess Profits tax might be applied and sums
returned to the State in such a way as to ensure their
ultimate return to the consumer by way of reduction
in the price of food staples, which would probably
be controlled by the State in the future as they now
were. After tracing brief v the history of the earlier
efforts at co-partnership, Mr. Walls outlined the well-
known features of the South Metropolitan Gas Com-
pany’s scheme. The Gas Company, he said, were
favourably situated in many ways for practising co-
partnership, because the profits rose or fell according
to the price of gas. In the case of the South Metro-
politan Company there was a standard price of 3s. Id.
per 1,000 cu. ft., and a 4 per cent, standard dividend
on capital. For every penny reduction in the price
of gas the shareholders got 2s. 8d. per cent, more
dividend. The labour co-partners at the same time
got three-quarters per cent, on their wages. Thus in
1912, when the company’s price was 2$. 2d., the share-
holders received £5 9s. 4d. per cent, dividend, and the
labour co-partners 5 per cent, on their wages. The
position during the second half of 1917 was different,
because, owing to increasing war costs, the price of
gas had to be raised to 3s. Id., so that there was no
bonus for the partners. Dr. Carpenter had stated that
labour had accepted the situation without demur.
The Gas Company’s was a model scheme which in a
definite ratio benefited the consumer, the shareholder,
and labour. About £750,000 had been paid out to
the labour co-partners, and the employees held over
£380,000 of the company’s ordinary stock. That was
approximately 5 per cent, on wages, and just orer
1 pei' cent, on capital above the minimum rate of
dividend. He put forward co-partnership as a.positive
scheme based on the existing industrial structure of
private enterprise—a scientific attempt at equitable
distribution of the profits of industry. What co-
partnership needed for its complete success was the
accession of 100 well-authenticated schemes on a large
scale.

Dr. Charles Carpenter said that the best way in
which the chemical industry could approach this sub-
ject was to remember that after the war they would
reap none of the benefits from it unless they could
be certain that labour would take up an attitude
different from that which actuated it to-day. Sir
George Livesey twenty-nine years ago had described
the existing condition of affairs as one in which the
worker endeavoured to do as little as he possibly
could and get as much as he possibly could for it.
Unless the public Press lied very much, that expressed
to a large extent the attitude to-day. The object of
maintaining a great proportion of the staff in any
works was to increase the output, but nothing what-
ever was’done to instruct or educate the average
worker. The result was that after he left school, where
he obtained a very frail foundation, there was only
one type of leader at whose feet he sat, and that was
the Socialist agitator. Nobody else took any trouble
to instruct him as to what the real basis of industry
consisted of. Co-partnership educated the worker
into a knowledge of the principles upon which industry
should be conducted. By it the worker was taught
what the masters themselves had to learn. Having
educated the worker on those principles, they found
that he was not very different from other people in
other circles of life. Another aspect of co-partnership,
which was a most important one, was that it gave
the worker an opportunity of seeing something else
in the future than what might be described as broken-
down old age. It gave him an opportunity of work-
ing independently of those clubs and organisations
to which most of the workpeople had been driven, and
of making some provision for the time when he would
no longer be able to earn a livelihood. In that respect
there was something to be said in favour of what had
been described as the Gas Company’s systems, because
what happened was that, having arrived at the amount
of bonus to which the man was entitled, he was allo-
cated ordinary stock of the company. That was pre-
cisely the same stock which all the shareholders, from
the director down, held; and when the man left the
service of the company he took it away with him.

If he died it became his wife’s property, and it was
handed on to his children. It was his property in
the real sense of the word, and was as inalienable as
property should be. That was an important point,
because a suggestion was made sometimes that work-
men were driven in these matters, and not led. It
was perfectly true that in building up systems of
co-partnership it was necessary to get over one of
the initial difficulties, namely, that as soon as a worker
who had never been accustomed to anything but his
wages got something in the way of a bonus, he almost
invariably very quickly spent it. There was no doubt
whatever that a great many of the schemes had come
to grief because instead of the money being properly
used it was wasted, and instead of the workman being
better off for it he was worse off. Therefore there
was an advantage in making it inconvenient for the
worker to get rid of his stock as long as he continued
in the particular employment of which he was a profit
sharer or co-partner; otherwise the share which he
had obtained was absolutely his own property. The
original idea was that one-half of the bonus should
be invested in permanent stock, and the other half
invested, So that the investor could, supposing he fell
on troublesome times, draw upon that fund for
temporary assistance; but in practice the great bulk
of the fund was invested in the same way as the
other half. The most interesting point was the effect
of the system on labour. There had been opportunities
of making a direct comparison between labour output
with and without co-partnership, paying the same rate
and wages and using identical machinery, and then
it had been found that there was a great advantage
to the credit of co-partnership workers. Then, with
regard to what he might call the 12| per cent, disease
which was running through the whole of the land, it
had been pointed out that the gas companies at the
present time had no profit to divide, and the work-
men were getting no bonus, but only the ordinary wage
applicable to the industry. In connection with the 12J
per cent, award, the co-partners approached their
committee, and after discussing the question of the
12J per cent, award, the men decided that the con-
ditions of the company did not warrant their pressing
for the award. Here were some thousands of men
who were content to carry on their work and accept
what was in effect a lower rate and wage than that
which was customary in the district. That surely
was a very remarkable example of how working men
trained in co-partnership would look at the question
from both sides. When he had told the men that
he thought they had come to a very patriotic decision,
they said they were not thinking so much of them-
selves; what they wanted to do was to get the com-
pany right so that it would be ready for their mates
when they came back from the front. Another point
was the much debated one on the value of having
working men on the board of management. It was said
that they were quite out of place there, and it was
asked what they could do. The men themselves would
be the first to say that the great bulk of business
carried on round the board table was quite beyond
them, but there were many matters appertaining to
the conditions of employment and work generally
where the advice and counsel of the men was extremely
valuable. There was also the. advantage that the
working men knew they were directly represented on
the managing body. A parallel case was Parliament.
Could it be imagined that the working man should
be excluded from Parliament? A very good case was
that of Mr. Clynes, the Food Controller. He was a
man with the ability who had found his opportunity. A
business was like Parliament on a very much smaller
scale, and what was an advantage in one case could not
be proved to be a disadvantage in the other. After an
experience of many years, he would be sorry to depart
from the principles practised by the South Metro-
politan Company. The future of industry depended
on how labour could be educated to take its share
in the management, and if they took the same pains
in getting the maximum yield from humanity as from
brains, he was sure they would get as valuable a
result from it. The South Metropolitan Gas Company
had a combing-out committee of the workmen, which
had dealt with 2,000 cases in the various works and
had come to decisions, quite apart from the cast-iron
regulations issued by the authorities, as to whether
men were or were not indispensable, and in that way
hundreds of men had been released for the Army who
would otherwise have been going on as if there were
no war. Another instance was that at the time of
the Boer War, when the allowances to the dependants
of soldiers who had been killed or who had died in
the war were very miserable, the co-partners took upon
themselves the problem of making allowances to the
widows and dependent children, so that the latter
could be brought up until they reached the age of
16. It was only about the time that the present war
broke out that the last of these responsibilities ceased.
Now they had done precisely the same thing in the
present case, and although there were many hundreds
of cases, they were being dealt with through com-
mittees individually which were granting from 2s. 6d.
to 15s. per week, in accordance with the requirements
of the case, and the fund had been reported to him
as having passed £100,000 a short time ago.

Mr. W. D. A. Bost said that before co-partnership
schemes could be worked out, it was necessary to arrive
at a minimum wage for the lowest paid worker.

The President said that one of the most important
subjects that had to be dealt with to-day was how
to satisfy the aspirations of labour. He was perfectly
certain that industry could not survive in this country
unless we succeeded in persuading the workers that
their interests lay in producing as much as possible.
Until that economic fact was brought home to the
workmen of this country, the conditions would con-
tinue to be difficult. He was not sure that one of
the great drawbacks to co-partnership was that it did
not directly reward productiveness. His own view was
that some modification by which the workman was paid
according to his production was one of the necessities
of the case. Although he confessed it was not easy to