It is easy to foresee the difficulties with which a policy which planned to create an ordered scheme of wage relationships by maintaining existing differentials would be confronted. Claims will constantly be presented by particular groups for some improvement in their economic position. These claims could not be disregarded merely on the score that they contravened the scheme of established differentials. The issue that would arise is clearly exemplified by statements made in the course of two of the most important industrial conflicts that occurred in England of recent years. "We claim," the Secretary of one of the Shop Committees of the Molders' Union wrote in defense of the demand of his union for differential treatment under an award made for the whole of Engineering Trades--which demand provoked the molders' strike, "we claim that our work is totally different in many ways from the other departments in the engineering industry. It is arduous, dirty, dangerous, hot, unhealthy, and highly skilled, and we claim separate treatment on these grounds. There is no other department in the engineering industry with so high a percentage of sickness or accidents.... You mention the employers' attitude towards the molders' application--a refusal to grant to molders any separate consideration because other classes of workers would also expect it. To me such an attitude is both unfair and untenable. If the molder can prove that his conditions of working are vile, dangerous and unhealthy, it is surely fair to ask for a proper recompense for such work...."[137] And consider this extract from one of the reports of the Coal Industry Commission, signed by six members of the Commission. "It will, however, be said that desirable as may be an improvement in the miners' conditions, the industry will not bear the cost of a reduction in hours, even if the aggregate output is, by an increase in numbers and, therefore, in the wages bill restored to its pre-war level, without involving a considerable advance in the price of coal, with possible adverse effects on our export trade, on manufacturing industry generally, and on the domestic consumer. We have to observe that if the improvement in the miner's standard of life is really required for the greater efficiency of the industry itself, or in the national interest, the fact that it might involve a temporary increase in the price of coal would not be conclusive against it. Moreover, if hours of labor have been reduced in other industries, and if the standard of life has been advanced among other sections of the community, it would be unsuitable to withhold a similar advance from the miners, merely because the others have got in first."[138]