Quote Originally Posted by great_fire View Post
I don't think anyone wanted their children to follow then down.

In the later days it was different though, a lot safer and better paid.
It was a living wage fire , as a faceworker you could earn enough to have a modest car and mortgage , two weeks holiday , pay your bills and feed your family .

Given the nature of the work and dangers we accepted that it was the reason we earned what we did in comparison to factory work at that time .

Even though personally the work wasn't great you still fought to keep the relative lifestyle you enjoyed .

This wasn't a career it was a job , a job that paid above other forms of work in this area .

You have to factor in the times of 1984 / 85 , no minimum wage and jobs were hard to come by , if you lost your job back then you could be unemployed for 12 to 18 months easily .

Yet again going back to the times of the day , the safety only improved because of the lessons learned when people were killed down there , risk assessments didn't exist .

Don't let anyone tell you different , we had to graft , we had targets to hit and the management were on your backs if you didn't hit them , there was no fecking about , just because the NUM was a strong union didn't mean you could take the pyss down there .