
Appalachian miners reject retraining because they think coal will make comeback - Geekette
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-effect-coal-retraining-insight/awaiting-trumps-coal-comeback-miners-reject-retraining-idUSKBN1D14G0
======
otakucode
Consider 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
I'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
Perhaps 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

~~~
thebooktocome
100 years ago, the Dems were still the party of southern pride. I think the
shift is about more than "economic anxiety"

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.

~~~
ZoeZoeBee
Except that has nothing to do with why they voted as they did going back to
before the 20th century as rural America has never been about today's
Democratic ideals. The Miners and their Unions have been supportive of
Democrats since before FDR.

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

------
jwalgenbach
So 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
Agreed. 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
The 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
Yes. 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.

------
jimmyswimmy
Sitting (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
Your 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.)

------
chroem-
Before 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?

~~~
chrisbennet
I'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=123...](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=chrisbennet&next=12378832)
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?"

~~~
heurist
There are tons of things I'd want to try if I became redundant due to
automation. However, if that were to suddenly happen the world would quickly
change so dramatically that we would not be able to determine what careers are
stable and worth training in, so I'm not sure that's a fair example.

------
bmcusick
According 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
This.

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.

------
CPLX
Maybe 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
Or 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
Could you have also mentioned the part where they aren’t paid while training
and they have no guarantee of a job after training?

~~~
_Codemonkeyism
I 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.

------
moomin
There’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
_Coal 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...](https://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21730406-what-can-be-done-help-
them-globalisation-has-marginalised-many-regions-rich-world)

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.

------
makomk
Retraining 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-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/magazine/retraining-jobs-
unemployment.html) 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-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/us/politics/coal-country-is-
wary-of-hillary-clintons-pledge-to-help.htm)

------
madengr
RE-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
Skills 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
This 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
that 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.

------
Feniks
Even if it does why use American coal? That's why coal mines closed in Europe:
cheap imports from South America and Australia.

~~~
jorgen123
Actually, 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-i...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/coal-jobs-in-
appalachia/?utm_term=.7c5b8b318675)

------
sjg007
I thought a few years ago that China was buying a large amount of coal, in
fact most of it. Has that changed?

------
StavrosK
Something something his job depends on not understanding that thing.

------
StuPendisdick
It will, and that just pisses the Socialist Marxist Left off.

~~~
sctb
Lame 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)

------
kapauldo
Sad how one wing of the party manipulates the other.

