Joe Gormley

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Joseph (Joe) Gormley, Baron Gormley, OBE (5 July 1917-27 May 1993) was born in Ashton-in-Makerfield, in Lancashire in 1917. He became a miner at the age of fourteen and served in many aspects of the coal mining industry. He was an active trade union official and became a committee member of National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1957. He served as general secretary of the north-western region from April 1961, before he joined the national executive in 1963.

In 1971, he was elected as leader of the NUM and presided over the strike that started on 9 January 1972. The strike lasted for seven weeks and after a month caused power cuts. Emergency measures were used to economise on electricity by reducing the working week to three days.^[1] After much negotiation the strike was resolved on 25 February 1972 with greatly increased pay and concessions won by the miners.^[2]

Two years later, the miners voted again for a strike which started on 4 February 1974. Edward Heath called a snap election on this issue, asking the public to decide over whether unions had too much power. Gormley tried to persuade the National Executive Conference to postpone the strike until after any election, but this advice was not followed; the strike went ahead. After the election replaced the Tories with a new Labour government, the union's demands were met. The new "Plan for Coal" of that year was extremely ambitious. In 1981, Thatcher threatened to break with the plan and close 23 pits. When a national strike was threatened, Thatcher backed down; many miners went on unofficial strike in the year, but Gormley rejected calls for a national strike.

It was alleged in a BCC2 Investigative Journalism TV series True Spies in 2002 that Gormley had worked for Special Branch in passing on information of extremism within his own union.^[3] He had always been a moderate leader and his members were, on average, more prepared to resort to militancy.

He left the post in 1981 and was replaced by the more left-wing Arthur Scargill. One of Gormley's long-term impacts that effected the 1984-5 strike was his role in the wage reforms of 1977. The reforms paid miners a wage proportionate to the output of their region. This gave the Nottinghamshire miners the highest wages of all and they were very reluctant to go on strike in 1984, when none of their pits were under threat and they had high wages to lose. Another key issue is that two ballots of the NUM membership rejected these reforms, and Gormley responded by declaring productivity schemes to now be an issue for the regional committees to decide, with or without a regional ballot. When this was challenged in a high court as a violation of union rules, the court upheld Gormley's decision. This confusion over when the NUM needed to hold a ballot became an issue of huge importance during the 1984-5 strike, when Scargill tried to mimic Gormley's methods and make a national strike into something that regional committees could decide on.

He was made a life peer as Baron Gormley, of Ashton-in-Makerfield in Greater Manchester in the 1982 Birthday Honours.

[edit] Autobiography

• Joe Gormley (1982). Battered cherub. Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-10754-7. 

[edit] References

[edit] See also

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Paul Routledge, Gormley, Joseph, Baron Gormley (1917–1993) (HTML). Oxford University Press (2004). Retrieved on 3 December 2006.

Political offices
Preceded by Sidney Ford	President of the National Union of Mineworkers 1971–1982	Succeeded by Arthur Scargill