Merry Christmas

With eleven children to support, conscientious Coal Miner Willie Farrel, who neither smokes nor drinks, prefers to work all his holidays. In his twelve years at Scotland's Mauchline Colliery near Glasgow, Farrell has been off only twice, once to stay at home when his wife was having a baby, another time to go to the hospital to have his ulcers treated. By working on all of his regular days off and on his two-week paid vacation each year, Willie got double pay for a lot of his time.

Last summer, chafing over Willie's industry, fellow miners told him that he should take his days off like everyone else. "We fought for holidays and every-one should take them," they said. Anxious to please, Willie agreed to take a vacation signed up for a bowling tournament and got his vacation pay in advance. Then his bosses, shorthanded, asked him to change his mind.

Without Pay. Still anxious to please, Willie put off the vacation and went to work at double time. Last week the National Union of Mineworkers threatened to call a strike of 900 colliery workers unless Willie took his vacation. So Willie did. He hoped that now everyone would be satisfied, but it did seem a bit hard on the kids, who face a lean Christmas because their father, who has long since spent the money he got last summer, will get no pay for the two weeks.

Willie Farrell was not the only union man to incur the displeasure of his fellow workers. Sixteen members of the confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions who, for one reason or another, had refused to observe a nationwide one-day "token strike" were sentenced to social ostracism in their own plants. At Derbyshire's Staveley Iron Works, Worker Ron Hewitt was forced to take his meals alone. For the next six months, Ron's 300 co-workers will not even give him a "good morning" when he comes to work. Their only communication with him during his five hours at work each day will be the monosyllables "up" or "down" necessary to his job as a crane operator.

Without Party. In Coventry, Electrical Worker Lucy Williams, who had also showed up for work on strike day, was given back the ten shillings that she had contributed to the factory Christmas-party fund, and was told that if she went to the party everybody else would leave. "I had a good cry over it," said Lucy. "Then I took the afternoon off and had my hair permed and that made me feel better."

These Christmas presents were as nothing, however, compared to the plans that the 400,000-strong National Union of Railwaymen was making for the whole nation last week. Getting nowhere after months of negotiations with the boss--the government--the N.U.R.'s strapping Scottish Secretary Jim Campbell threatened to bring all British railways to a full stop over Christmas. "My men are sick, sore and sorry," he said. "They feel that they are on the losing end of nationalization."

If the railwaymen, who consider themselves among Britain's most underpaid workers, bring off their strike, it will be the most serious work stoppage in Britain since the paralyzing General Strike of 1926.

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