Hacker News Reader

Comment by billsmithaustin | Hacker News Reader

It’s economic pain for coal miners.

The entire coal industry currently employs about 50K people. Meanwhile, Sears has cut 250K jobs in the last 15 years.

A comparison which doesn't lessen the pain for those 50,000 mostly well-paid people in any regard what-so-ever.

Those jobs are often not easy to replace financially for the people working them. It involves uprooting their families, or being away for weeks at a time, working in the natural gas industry or similar, and they still don't make more than they were making in coal. I grew up around coal country Appalachia. Making $50,000 per year in a coal mine in the early 1990s, anywhere in Appalachia, was a financial godsend for those workers. I knew a lot of families that it provided a solid middle class life for, people that otherwise were going to be stuck working low wage jobs in those regions, if there were any jobs at all (and it was a hard, dirty, unhealthy, dangerous job; they all knew that).

A typical Sears worker has plenty of other opportunities at comparable or higher pay. There isn't a shortage of $13-$15 / hour jobs in the US, particularly in the locations where most Sears stores operated historically.

We should be putting those workers to work as part of the NPS/US Forest Service in Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains as these extraction jobs phase out. Better to focus on conservation and remediation instead of extraction IMHO (and the cost to employee someone in such a role is not much higher per person, ~$65k/year, than they'd receive at max social security benefits [~$35k/year]).

The usfs is short 50k people in Appalachia?

Not all coal mining happens in Appalachia (this specific company mines in Wyoming and Montana). Is it unreasonable to expect it straightforward to transition workers from an industry that employs less people than Arby's (the fast food establishment) into other roles?

Better yet, put them to work reclaiming mine sites where possible. Rape is not too strong a word to describe mountain top removal. I don't even care if it comes out of my taxpayer dollars instead of the pockets of the coal operators who need to be held responsible, I just want it done. It has to be done, there are places in West Virginia that have been on boiled water warnings long before Flint. And so much of Appalachian culture is having deep ties to the land, so it'd be very meaningful work in the same way being an nth generation coal miner is meaningful work, regardless of how misguided that seems to outsiders.

Interesting idea. What does reclaiming a mine site achieve practically? Any chance an abandoned mine could be repurposed as a datacenter, solar panels lining what used to be a mountain top?

Reclamation of mine sites mitigates risks such as unstable spoil piles, acid drainage, water quality issues, and potential cave-ins.

Like the automobile was for farriers and the refrigerator was for ice deliverers.

It's awful because real people are losing their jobs and probably don't have the best prospects. It's necessary though. It's one of the reasons a good government has social programs to support those whose jobs become obsolete.

> Like the automobile was for farriers and the refrigerator was for ice deliverers.

One significant difference: coal employees are concentrated in a relatively small number of communities, which means that those communities are collectively suffering greatly, and the employees have fewer opportunities because there are no more jobs locally.

Farriers and ice deliverers were relatively evenly distributed, lessening the overall community impact and making it much easier to find a new career.

Another significant difference is that coal is concentrated in states that even though they have almost no population still wield 2 senate seats. This is one of the, if not the reason that coal continues to thrive.

Coal continues to "thrive" because it went out of its way to keep those people impoverished and unable to fight back while it bought their state governments from governors down to school boards and sherrifs.

You should go read about the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Coal Wars. Big Coal more or less committed genocide in Appalachia and not only got away with it but had some assistance from the US government. That's how powerful they are. The number of senators these states have is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme.

Sure, but that's a surprisingly small industry given the political football it's been. Arby's employs more people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/31/8-sur...

How many does Arby's employ at $50K a year? For that matter, how many does Arby's employ full time?

And how many small towns will disappear if Arby's does?

Perhaps politics in congress is driven more by the mine owners than it is by the miners.

A failure on the part of the government and themselves to prepare for the inevitable. Mostly the government, since they're the ones we measure by unemployment rates.

Economic pain for coal miners is a political issue.

You could for instance encourage solar companies to hire ex coal miners and pay them good wages.

These jobs aren't in the same places and many people won't move.

In a few decades the people unwilling to move will be pensioners. Like gold mining towns, these will become abandoned eventually.

Wish it was that easy, you can't just reschool a coalminer into an entirely different profession 10 years before their retirement.

You can easily skill shift a coal miner into eg the natural gas industry. Including at 10 years prior to retirement. I've known at least a dozen miners that transitioned to natural gas, in the greater Marcellus shale region.

When shifting an experienced miner to the natural gas industry, the problem isn't education, it's replacement pay. They're usually technically, industrially competent people, and are well suited to the oil and natural gas industries as far as ease of skill adaptation goes. It's something our government/s should be pursuing aggressively (except usually the states where the coal industry exists don't want to go against those jobs and actively encourage that shift). If done correctly, you could make the job shift from coal to other energy industries far easier, buffering the labor hit, and drain the coal industry of the labor it needs to operate (accelerating its demise).

Replacement pay and relocation. Asking an older blue collar worker to move away from family and friends to another state, more or less involuntarily, is much harder than encouraging a young tech worker to move to, say, California.

Really doubt that solar companies are hiring in the same towns as coal mines are. The reality is that when the mines go, the communities supported by the mines will go, too.

Tennessee had a budding green power sector back around 2005. TVA nuked it with absurd, arbitrary restrictions on who can put up solar panels on their houses because TVA is in bed with the coal operators and green power was competition they didn't want. It kills me to think about how much more money this state would have in its economy now if that hadn't happened.

There's reasons the whole "just replace coal jobs with solar jobs" thing has never played out. It's not for a lack of trying or because nobody here ever coming up with the idea. It's because the powers that be sure as hell weren't gonna let it fly.

(TVA continues to be the least green utility in the South btw. Promotion of the welfare of the people of the Tennessee Valley my ass.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com