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I asked if that was a factor. I was told that of course, as I must know, labor costs in mining are always a heavy factor in costs, because due to the nature of the situation the costs are mostly labor. You own the ground. You either pay a rent for it or buy it. That's a capital investment. But to get that coal to market is very largely labor cost. They had estimated, and I think I had looked that up, that seventy-seven per cent of the cost was the labor cost. So a small change in wages affected the price of coal because seventy-seven per cent of the whole cost was labor.

Nevertheless, they had no complaints to make about wages at that time. Wages had risen, but they had not risen more than other wages had over what they had been twenty-five years earlier. Their principal problem, so far as labor was concerned, was unemployment and the fact that they could never give employment again. Also their technical difficulties were such that they couldn't with their present capital hope to develop their mines or hope to work them.

After a number of them had spoken, the original spokesman got up and said, “Now that we have made our position clear as to what our problems are, we have a proposal to make. We propose that the government take over the coal mines of this country and operate them. Private industry and private enterprise can never operate them. We know that to be the case.”