The resistance and edge-reduction conjecture for snarks

Let $G$ be a snark. Define the resistance $r(G)$ to be the minimum number of edges that can be removed from $G$ so that the resulting graph is $3$-edge-colorable, and define $e_r(G)$ to be the minimum number of pairwise non-adjacent edges whose removal and subsequent suppression of incident vertices produces a $3$-edge-colorable graph. Resistance and edge-reduction conjecture.

$$r(G)\geq 2e_r(G).$$

This conjectured relation connects two measures of how far a snark is from being $3$-edge-colorable and is stated as a conjecture in the cited literature; no resolution is supplied in the paper.