Appalachian miners reject retraining because they think coal will make comeback
reuters.com
reuters.com
West Virginia, despite being as far from Cosmopolitan as you can get has been a Democratic stronghold until the last election cycle
Their votes are "taken for granted" because they're a tiny constituency, and their livelihood was always going to disappear. Mines have become progressively more automated (like everything else) and between natural gas and renewable energy options, it's simply no longer the economic home run it used to be.
The lack of reality among some around here does amaze me
Ok, read the parent. Appalachian Miners do not vote overwhelmingly Republican to protect their union jobs and government subsidies. For the longest time they voted Democratic to Protect their Union Jobs and Government subsides until their jobs were no longer there.
Their jobs aren't coming back, that's a given, and the reaction to that was to stop voting for the people they thought would protect their way of living, only to see a shift over the last decade where their voice was completely drowned out in the Democratic party
edit @CalChris Because your reading comprehension is not the best. They voted for their own economic interests by voting Democratic. You do realize in 2008 both of WVs Senators were Dems and so was their governor. Since the Depression the vast majority of West Virginia's Senate seats have been filled by Dems
And they'll find themselves with no long-term improvement in employment, and a dramatically weaker safety net as a bonus.
https://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers...
Looks more like Cheeto took them for a ride. He does that. Is WV voting its interest in the opioid crisis? I don't think more guns, gays and god will get them out of it.
When people are despised and neglected, they tend to notice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic#/media/File%...
Not sure why the governing party isn’t being held responsible for, you know, governing.
The transgender kids and sexual assault of college women coverage was on Fox. Again, guns, gays and god ain’t gonna get us out of this. But it will deliver the votes in places like WV.
People innth field were talking about it before that, but meth was still getting more attention; that's pretty much true of each of the unbroken sequence of specific-drug abuse crises, too.
Whack-a-mole with specific drugs isn't a solution, it is something that will never make any progress but can generate the perpetual illusion of action.
You want to deal with cocaine/crack/meth/opioids and whatever tomorrow's iteration is, you deal with the health (including mental health and substance use disorder) prevention and treatment system, including cost and access issues, broadly. And the Dems are the only ones that aren't actively fighting to make that worse, rather than better, across the board. Everything else is the equivalent of shipping homeless from one town to the next to “fix” homelessness.
In fact, it was worse during the "Obama years" than before or after. "Steadily fell during the Obama years" is a flat lie.
Also, West Virginia isn't all of Appalachia. SE Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina are coal producing regions that are also very conservative.
Edit could the downvoter parked here show their face, literally five seconds after posting and you're downvoting have to assume you've gone down the thread downvoting everything, so just say hi
Capitalism is great, government is evil blah blah. But everyone loves those subsidised government programs.
You’re right this is how most people work. Makes me think we should start to unionize office work.
Unionizing SV will likely have the same result, except that with today's comm tech, importing services is much simple than building auto supply chain.
But unions must of course think about these things and understand their ACTUAL bargaining power. Detroit sounds like that mark was missed.
However we still have this problem: Employers see labor the same way, whether it's white or blue collar.
They and most other people in the world. What's happening to the Appalachian coal miners today is going to happen to tech sooner or later.
>You really can't expect them to not be defensive of their position, especially considering the history of open flagrant abuse and violence they've faced in the past.
But coal isn't going to make a comeback. The world has moved on from that economy. Trump lied to them, and fed them a populist self-insert power fantasy where America just strongarms the world into treating them with the respect they feel they deserve. That isn't going to happen.
How so? Care to elaborate on this?
I mean there’s a whole generation of CS graduate students focusing their attention babysitting machine learning algorithms.
... it's kind of entirely speculative by definition, isn't it?
And I get the argument that learning is difficult for some, and that union jobs are better than non-union jobs, and that it is difficult to move from an active job to one that is more sedentary. But so is losing your job in a dying industry and being unable to provide for your children, which is the alternative.
And I feel for them. I really do. They've been taken by the political equivalent of an email from a Nigerian prince. They wanted to believe so badly that they didn't check the history of the person making the promises, and ignored what facts they did get.
Furthermore, along the same lines, look at domestic oil. That is, fracking. Production has hockey stick'ed in the last 10 - 15 years. We didn't shift to renewables. We stuck with oil.
So again, why shouldn't coal believe the same? Most of the signals support their POV than otherwise.
Note: I agree 100%. Coal is f'ed. As it should be. But from the miners' POV there really isn't a clear message that say "time to give up." Clinton didn't say it. Bush didn't say it. Obama didn't say it.
Gee, making the Middle East less important to the US and putting the pinch on Russia, who'd want to do that?
It was also to prop up the otherwise failing econony.
But most in the coal industry don't see - perhaps by choice? - the nuances.
This isnt about jobs per say. It's about the perception that coal has a place in US energy future.
A real energy policy and real leaders would have delivered that message a long time ago. They have not. Why do you expect the miners to be any better than the highly paid and highly educated W.DC elites?
I find myself more surprised that the article ignored such basic points as these. Not that I am absolutely correct in my assessment, but that these kinds of points weren't addressed. Almost as if they didn't even occur to the author. The focus was on empty classrooms and money unspent and, perhaps, stubborn coal miners, while being wilfully ignorant that the jobs on offer are probably completely uninteresting to the communities affected. It probably seems better to them to hold out hope that coal will come back than to sit around driving trucks or coding.
At least in my state, many of the (re)training programs are for those and consist of a couple weeks of lecture followed by a few months of apprenticeship -- I suspect that they're simply sticking with the familiar while there's hope. People do that.
The empty classrooms is probably referring to the fact that every program begins with a little domain specific knowledge, so the people observing the intake look at that part of the funnel that every program goes through -- and then make comments about it from their perspective.
The article is a little deaf in saying "100 programs from coding to nursing". I'm guessing the fields are actually widely broader than that in the kind of work, since he found a program in coal mining among those 100, and I don't consider that between coding and nursing in any sense. (I think that left you with the impression they only train office or service work, for instance.)
Some would, some wouldn’t (I have exp. here too). It’s a problem but it’s not THE problem. The problem is politicians in coal states (including POTUS) keep peddling this bullshit story that coal will come back. The effects of this are terrible. It’s hurting communities.
Imagine if tomorrow there was an AI that obsoleted the entire software industry. Would you willingly retrain as a carpenter?
They average $76,000/year, which is not that bad depending on where you live. You can do better than that, as much of the industry is slowed down during the winter months. The few that I know take that layoff as a yearly winter vacation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chrisbennet&next=123... half way down the page, search for "As a thought exercise"
"As a thought exercise, what will/would software developers do once 90% are made redundant by A.I. or something? Maybe "suck it up" and go back to school to become nurses?"
I feel arrogant and condescending for saying this, but it's the way I see it.
There is some logic to why they're deciding to not take re-training.
And the unsubsidized cost isn’t far behind and is still falling. It fell 9% last year.
For those willing to move around, there will be a huge demand for transmission line workers linking solar and wind resources to where they're needed.
It's hard blue collar work that pays fairly.
"[...] he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.
He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course. 'I think there is a coal comeback,' said the 33-year-old son of a miner. [...]
'I have a lot of faith in President Trump,' Sylvester said."
I could quote your lines.
I could quote the lines where it says he is training for $13/h low paying coal job because coal companies sell their assets to companies that only hire temporary workers.
I could quote the part where it says that new companies will not come if there is no trained workforce, so those people are stuck in a catch-22.
I could quote the part where it says that people retrain where there is no hope, but don't retrain where there is coal left.
I could quote the part where it says coal companies move to natural gas.
I could quote the part where one miner says the coal is a great career path for the next 50 years.
Or people could be interested and read the article.
The only way the coal industry survives as a major employer is as a form of disguised welfare.
The Economist ran an excellent piece a few weeks back contrasting Scranton, PA and Greenville, SC. The latter was able to re-invent itself by attracting BMW to build a plant there, which saw them out of their catch-22. PA, despite offering billions in subsidies over the years has had no such luck.
https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21730406-what-can-be...
However, exactly how to do this is still uncertain:
> South Carolina has not become an all-purpose manufacturing powerhouse. In fact, manufacturing employment is lower in the region than it was when BMW set up shop. But real incomes are growing and the population is booming. Greenville is 70% bigger than it was in 1990.
> Its success shows the value of co-ordination. There is a chicken-and-egg problem in establishing a cluster. Firms would like to be where there are workers, suppliers and infrastructure; workers want places where firms are already offering good new jobs. Neither will go where the other isn’t. But action on a number of fronts can, under the right circumstances, attract both at once, creating a kernel round which a cluster can grow large enough to become self-sustaining. After that, it may well invigorate other areas of the local economy.
> Strategies which build clusters through such two-way seduction are hard to assess.
If you are unemployed and sitting around, why not pick up some new skills if training is free? You can always go back to mining if it comes back. It’s not like learning something new means losing old knowledge.
If you know mining, and an electrician, a mine electrician will be payed much better than either alone. Combining skills is where it’s at.
while there are several good points made in the video, one really made me think: if you're in an IQ segment that gives you lot of opportunities - as the prof said: "not just opening word, but programming" -, it is really easy to forget that many people might struggle with "reasonable simple" tasks.
Everyone needs to face that economically, US coal production increasingly doesn't makes sense.