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Appalachian miners reject retraining because they think coal will make comeback
- Feniks 9y agoEven if it does why use American coal? That's why coal mines closed in Europe: cheap imports from South America and Australia.
- jorgen123 9y agoActually, your question should be: Why use Appalachian coal? And indeed, coal production has shifted to Wyoming where it is cheaper to produce with less labor. So even if coal comes back, it will not likely come back to Appalachia. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/coal-jobs-in-appalachia/?utm_term=.7c5b8b318675 https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/coal-jobs-i...
- StavrosK 9y agoSomething something his job depends on not understanding that thing.
- StuPendisdick 9y agoIt will, and that just pisses the Socialist Marxist Left off.
- tenpaiyomi 9y agoAll trends show it's not making a comeback. The only thing actively pushing it on are government subsidies and programs intended to push it over alternative energies.
- ch4s3 9y agoCare to explain how you think natural gas, solar, and wind aren't going to continue to crush demand for coal in the US? To top that off, there is almost no foreign demand at the price we can produce coal. Even still, downward pressure on prices and loosening of regulations drives companies toward mountaintop removal which employs far fewer workers at far lower wages. Everyone needs to face that economically, US coal production increasingly doesn't makes sense.
- sctb 9y agoLame political trolling is definitely not needed on this site. Could you please never do it again? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- madengr 9y agoRE-training is a poor choice of words. 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.
- olegkikin 9y agoSkills that are actually useful and have enough demand aren't that easy to get. I'm extremely skeptical when people claim we can solve the automation job losses by retraining everyone. Converting a 50 year old miner to a programmer capable of solving real world problems seems like a pipe dream. Sure, there will be exceptional individuals who love to learn new things, but they are exceptional. Look at the market now - programmers already have high salaries, and it's still hard to find the talent.
- xiphias 9y agoThis video explains well the job problem for people who are unable to learn fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0&t=8s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0&t=8s
- alternize 9y agothat was a great 10 min watch, thanks! 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.
- CPLX 9y agoMaybe they reject "retraining" because the programs available suck and are useless and unlikely to actually help them improve their life, and then tell stories to out of town reporters when asked. Just a theory.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoOr when reading the article "[...] 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."
- toomuchtodo 9y agoCould you have also mentioned the part where they aren’t paid while training and they have no guarantee of a job after training?
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoI could copy and paste the whole article. 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.
- yorwba 9y agoDon't those also hold for the coal mining course?
- colmvp 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chroem- 9y agoBefore someone inevitably mocks these people as being less enlightened, this isn't that surprising. Labor isn't fungible: retraining would involve abandoning a career and all the seniority it entails, going back to school and losing the ability to work and generate income, and finally being forced to relocate. Is their attachment to coal tragic? Yes. Is it unreasonable? No. Imagine if tomorrow there was an AI that obsoleted the entire software industry. Would you willingly retrain as a carpenter?
- RealityVoid 9y agoI will go little bit off-topic here, but regarding your question, I would, carpentry sounds very interesting and engaging. What I would miss would be the nice salary that comes with working in SW.
- KGIII 9y agoUnion carpenters can make pretty good money, actually. Once you get some seniority, the rate improves nicely. Finish carpenters make pretty good wages. 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.
- pault 9y agoAlso consider that $76,000 with the ability to find plenty of work outside of coastal metropolitan areas is a pretty sweet deal.
- chrisbennet 9y agoI've asked this question before (what would you do if software development went away[1]) and the response indicated that they would not, or could not entertain that thought. Instead they posited that such a world would be impossible or that developers could go back to school to be lawyers - not realizing that new law school grads had a 25% unemployment rate. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chrisbennet&next=12378832 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?"
- otakucode 9y agoConsider it from their perspective. If they leave a job as a union-protected coal miner, their options are garbage, trained or not. They'll be going from a situation where they can expect and get reasonable compensation which grows faster than cost of living increases, pensions, etc to being treated like a cost center to be manipulated and reduced, forced to hop jobs every 4 or 5 years to even remain at market rate for their skill level, etc. 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.
- thebooktocome 9y agoI'd try to consider it from their perspective, but I get confused by the part where they vote overwhelmingly Republican to protect their union jobs and government subsidies.
- ZoeZoeBee 9y agoPerhaps you get confused about the long history of Appalachian Coal Miners voting solidly Democratic, 100 years of such, only to see their votes taken for granted and their livelihood disappear. West Virginia, despite being as far from Cosmopolitan as you can get has been a Democratic stronghold until the last election cycle
- ceejayoz 9y agoThe coal industry employs fewer people than Arby's. 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.
- ZoeZoeBee 9y agoYep at the moment they do, and they will continue to, but that has nothing to do with the fact that historically those in the industry voted Democratic not Republican. The lack of reality among some around here does amaze me
- bmcusick 9y agoAccording to the latest energy report from Lazard, the subsidized cost of solar and wind is now below the marginal cost of operating nuclear and coal plants. And the unsubsidized cost isn’t far behind and is still falling. It fell 9% last year.
- cjalmeida 9y agoThis. 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.
- jimmyswimmy 9y agoSitting (or, trendily, standing) before a desk all day working in a computer is not for everyone. These guys do hard, dangerous work in the mines in an environment that is very different from office work. They probably would have a very difficult time adjusting, not only to the office environment but also to the social rules in place in such environments (I write this with some experience of the difference between white collar and life-on-the-line work). It is no wonder that there is little interest in retraining into a field which is so different. 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.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y agoYour theory doesn't explain why they don't retrain in welding, plumbing, electrical work, construction, vehicle maintenance, etc which are all more similar to mining (particularly within certain parts of each field) than they are office work. 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.)
- ryanmarsh 9y agoThey probably would have a very difficult time adjusting, not only to the office environment but also to the social rules in place in such environments 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.
- sjg007 9y agoI thought a few years ago that China was buying a large amount of coal, in fact most of it. Has that changed?
- kapauldo 9y agoSad how one wing of the party manipulates the other.
- jwalgenbach 9y agoSo shockingly, people who have been fooled by a con artist (Trump) refuse to believe that they've been fooled. 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.
- chiefalchemist 9y agoAgreed. But I don't think this all falls on the current administration. US energy policy has been weak if not non-existent for as long as I can remember. Why shouldn't they believe it? No one (had the stones) to declare it dead; not part of our energy future; etc. 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.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe shift to fracking is US energy policy. With geopolitical goals behind it. Gee, making the Middle East less important to the US and putting the pinch on Russia, who'd want to do that?
- chiefalchemist 9y agoYes. I understand 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.
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- makomk 9y agoRetraining in general apparently has a bit of a mixed success rate at best. Instead of reading this article about the terrible, clueless Trump-supporting miners who are just too thick-headed to retrain, it might be worth reading up on what happens to those who do make use of retraining programs: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-unemployment.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-... Also, perhaps, about the past history of government retraining and investment programs in Appalachia and why people there didn't believe Clinton's promises during the election were worth much: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/politics/coal-country-is-wary-of-hillary-clintons-pledge-to-help.htm https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/politics/coal-country-...
- moomin 9y agoThere’s a lot to unpick here. There’s permanent unchanging things like the continued decline of the coal industry (there are precious few scenarios where it is cheaper and/or better than all of the many alternatives available). There’s the danger of wrapping up your profession and your identity (something we in tech should be on our guard against). But then there’s the grim and hopefully ephemeral spectacle of a bunch of rich politicians lying to their faces and giving them false hope. The only way the coal industry survives as a major employer is as a form of disguised welfare.
- js2 9y agoCoal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. 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-done-help-them-globalisation-has-marginalised-many-regions-rich-world 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.