1980s
In 1981, Prime Minister Margaret 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. He left his post in 1982 and was replaced by the more left-wing Arthur Scargill. In 1982, his last-minute appeal got miners to accept a Government offer of a 9.3% raise, rejecting Scargill's call for a strike authorisation.
One of Gormley's long-term legacies which affected the 1984-85 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 Nottinghamshire miners the highest wages of all and so they were very reluctant to go on strike in 1984, when none of their pits was under threat and those miners had high wages to lose.
Another key matter was that two ballots of the NUM membership had rejected these reforms, and Gormley responded by declaring productivity schemes now to be for the regional committees to decide, with or without a regional ballot. When this was challenged in the High Court as a violation of union rules, the court upheld Gormley. This confusion over when the NUM needed to hold a ballot became of huge importance during the 1984-5 strike, when Scargill tried to mimic Gormley's methods and make a national strike into something on which regional committees could decide.
He was made a life peer as Baron Gormley of Ashton-in-Makerfield in Greater Manchester in the 1982 Birthday Honours.
Read more about this topic: Joe Gormley