3 ms·
An honest day's pay for honest day's work, but without the willingness to get education / skills required for that work, to move to parts of the country where t
by elgenie 9y ago
An honest day's pay for honest day's work, but without the willingness to get education / skills required for that work, to move to parts of the country where the existing skills are in demand, or to use collective bargaining to get a larger share of the results of productivity.
The fantasy that coal mining jobs with wages that allow high school dropouts to support a single-income family living a middle class existence are coming back en masse to back country West Virginia is just that.
- Clubber 9y agoTake those ideas a few steps further and see if they still sound reasonable. Start with you live in a trailer or small home with your family (parents, uncles, aunts, brothers) in a small town that died 30 years ago, and you live on whatever assistance the state gives. Also, you may share an unreliable car between everybody, you might not even have that. That's probably a pretty decent scenario. Add a few drug addictions and a police record for drugs, and it gets significantly worse. Add a long term medical ailment. Add the inability to get any credit. Add some relatively massive debt. I don't want this to sound like it does, but I don't think you understand the reality of the situation that affects the vast majority of US land mass. Nobody said anything about coal, except Trump. Coal is economically dead, even the coal miner's know that. It's that since coal is gone, there is nothing else to turn to. It's all the other jobs and factories that have long since gone.