Abstract
The defeat of the miners' strike has been variously attributed to the role of the state, inappropriate and ill-conceived tactics used by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and bureaucratic trade union practices. Through a detailed analysis of the magnitude of fuel imports and how they were organised, this paper argues that the strike was defeated by the ability of the major energy users to substitute without hindrance imported coal and oil for domestically-produced coal. It is further argued that if the NUM had been well-organised it would have been able to predict the evasive logistics of the energy users and adjusted its tactics. The organisational defects of the NUM are seen as a manifestation of structured organisational inadequacies in British trade unions.
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