It's Time to Be Honest With Coal Country
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 10 авг 2023
- Subscribe to ATTN: on RUclips: attn.link/2kkjQIP
The glory days of coal? Not so fast. In this episode, @TraeCrowderLiberalRedneck takes a look at the real history of the coal industry and why EVERYONE needs to stop lying about the coal industry's past and future.
The American South is a complicated place, and we know a lot less about it than we think we do. And many things about the South that seem to make no sense are less confounding in context. The reality is the history of many Southern things has been manipulated, hidden, or just plain ignored. Trae Crowder guides us through the pride points, failures, and contradictions in "Southin' Off."
-
ATTN: is a media company that breaks down important societal topics and conversations into digestible, entertaining videos and series across all platforms. Check out more videos worth your ATTN: and subscribe to our channels below:
Facebook: / attn
Instagram: / attndotcom
Twitter: / attn
Snapchat: / attndotcom
There is no proud legacy of coal mining.
My father-in-law retired from the mines.
His one goal in life was that none of his children follow him underground.
My paternal grandfather his father’s side were long miners in west Cork and his paternal grandparents emigrated from west Cork to south Wales to work in the coal mines one of their sons became a teacher and his son his only child became an accountant in London working in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s before meeting my paternal grandmother in London who is from Ireland and moving to Ireland and working as an accountant.
In 2005 I was making $18.00 an hour here in the states operating a roofbolter , I took a job in Australia doing the same job for $150,000 a year working a 7 day on 7 day of schedule, 6 week vacation, three meals a day paid for , rent paid and a van picked me up and took me to work , I could never work in America in the mines again
Hah you last name is Hatfield? You legit boy.
In all seriousness though what you said is the reality. So many people fail to realize the massive profits their labor generates.
$18.00 per hour, no paid vacation or sick leave and you have to pay for your own transportation, room/board and retirement (401K).
We don't know any better so we accept it and call anyone negotiating for more lazy millennials.
Wow, interesting.
Well if you don’t want to work for $18/hr, they’ll hire a younger guy and pay him less.
@@blipco5 Then that younger guy is a sucker... Just like most of the working people in America!
Was that in Australian dollars?
My grandfather was a coal miner in Logan County, West Virginia for about forty years. He participated in the Battle of Blair Mountain and helped organize the miners' union. He died of Black Lung, a horrible disease that makes the victim believe they're drowning. My Dad got out. He earned a football scholarship at Wake forest and worked in the mines for two summer breaks from school, and experienced two cave-ins. When WWII broke out he left college and enlisted as did most everyone he knew. He returned in 1946, went back to school and earned his BA, and then went on to earn his Masters. He taught and coached football at the high school level for 55 years, and never had to step foot in another mine.
That is a great story, thank you. I'm a third-generation Union man myself. I know how hard the unions had to fight to achieve what we had in the 60's and 70s! Corporate America has been chipping away out us for the past 40 years! It's time the union men pick up those bats again!!
that is great for a guy with the chops to go to collage ... that accounts for about 40% ish of an average population what about the other 60%? what jobs are there any more for an average or god help you slightly below average person in your utopia? sooner or later (sooner for the below average) they end up as homeless addicts same as most of the coal minors whose lives were disrupted by Obama's policies.
I dearly hope that the world can reduce the burning of coal - toxic, radioactive, cancerous byproducts in addition to the climate destruction. But I also hope for the reemergence of unions - they were the major reason that most of us have any knowledge whatsoever of what "middle class" even means and what that economic class has contributed to the history of the US, western Europe, and the rest of the developed world. Without a healthy middle class democracy itself is resting on shifting sands.
I try to get people to understand the importance of the antitrust laws and the federal trade commission
@@patsymoore-ff2gz agreed!
My father was a lithographer, his father before him was in the Wehrmacht. Neither of those professions still exist (thankfully). The world doesn't owe anybody's family a vocational legacy.
I think the point they were driving at was less "vocational legacy" and more "job security".
It's a little like how a whole generation of kids was told "go to college, it's the gateway to the upper class" and then graduated into crippling debt and effed, exploitative job markets. The people who took that route believed it was the best shot they had at a better life for themselves and their children and... Well that's not going so great for a lot of them for reasons that are largely out of their control.
There's a reason they kept pointing out that if you're from that part of the country, your three decent-paying career paths are 1) the military 2) mine coal or 3) sell dope
The dope is illegal, and a lot of people aren't comfortable leasing themselves out to the government as potential killers. That leaves coal.
My mom's stepdad was the last of our family in the mines. Not everyone has been so lucky to escape them yet.
Lithographers are called graphic designers, and printers, nowadays (graphics designers are in demand for designing websites and things and printers still exist to print things, I have a friend that is a printer and prints recall notices, advertisements, posters, packaging, junk mail and other things) and the German Army can still called be the Wehrmacht, although it's a different organization under way different management nowadays ;) However, you do have a very valid point.
@@ajchapeliere college leading to crippling debt is a relatively recent development, it didn't used to be that way 30-40 years ago :(
A lot of countries have free, or at least low cost, college/university admissions. The USA should have that also.
@@Naris48 I agree! When it comes to labor and education, I think the US has some catching up to do. And some lobbyists to weed out of the political process.
The Wermacht still exists
I grew up in central Louisiana. My mother finished high school. My father left high school at 9th grade. They envisioned me working at a grocery store after high school. I can't blame them. They didn't have the wherewithal to think big. I did. Long story short, I went on to get a bachelors, masters degree and teach college. Now, nearing the end of my career, I'm glad I was stubborn and went my own way. I hope some of the kids of coal miners did that as well.
I went to high school in Charleston. The issues are societal, familial, and cultural. Outsiders have no idea what it takes to change. Even today I am considered an outsider who attended their high school for a couple of years. My dad was a pastor and was never accepted. If you want to help, you will have to work within their culture. Sure, occasionally a child here and there gets out, and gets an education, but even the ones I've met, "You can take the West Virginian out of West Virginia, but you can't take the West Virginia out of a West Virginian."
Colleges😂 A place to learn how to vote, loot, and protest, a complete liberal sewer, what's your MA and BA in, Liberal arts and gender study?
Unfortunately, for many it quite literally means they have to leave where they grew up, because there's only so much you can do in coal country, even with a degree. Yeah, you might be someone making dope, not just selling it, but apart from that? Especially as other traditionally respected jobs, like teachers, shopkeepers, doctors... have lost much standing and suffered an important wage loss in these areas...
Working full time at a grocery store is good, honorable work. It deserves good, honorable pay.
Not disrespect.
I'm glad that you were able to get the career you desired. If you had chosen the grocery store or the coffee shop, you should still be paid enough to live decently.
And not NEED a "safety net."
@@LivingWithCognitiveDissonance you should, but that's not reality. And while yes, retail deserves a decent paycheck and conditions, and with all the respect for the hard labour and/or soulcrushing service work, some people want and need something a little more challenging to roll out of bed. Not everyone wants or needs to be a manager, but we need them, too.
I live in WV. My dad was a coal miner for many years. He grew up in one of the coal mining camps. People are obsessed with coal. I wish we had something else for these people to do to earn money.
Y'all could if they would stop arguing in defense of a Corrupted Industry that's killing the planet and the miners who make it possible...
Coal is part of the culture there
I guess you'd like to live in the midevil times ?
Small modular reactors. What would these communities do with them? Use the heat to run plants that catalyze CO2 and water in the air back into fuel. Kerosene for jet fuel, propane, plastic precursors and even gasoline could be produced. These plants will need mechanics, plumbers, electricians, safety officers and truck drivers. The reactors could be put underground for safety in case of an explosion in the plant itself. Chances are there is already a mined out chamber nearby that could be adapted for this. It could start small scale, and over time people could move from the mines to the plant as it got bigger. If the project fails, the coal and mines are still there. If it works out, it helps secure American energy independence and gives the communities an industry that could be useful for millennia.
@@john8787 medieval
Amazing industry. I have heard about 5 generations of out of work coal miners voting Republican to bring back their jobs. Every 4 years, I hear about the "out of work coal miner." Being an out of work miner is a bigger industry than being a miner.
It's not Republicans that are the problem, we want less government involvement (EPA) with common sense regulations. Democrats worship at the altar of "climate change" and don't care how many lives they destroy to line their pockets over a false God
That last part captures it. My people were in the mountains just after the revolution. Farming semi-vertical land was a struggle. So selling their mineral rights was a no brainer. Time came when the choice was stay and work in the mines or go somewhere like Pittsburgh. We left. The great migration wasn’t just black folk leaving the cotton fields of Mississippi. But those who stayed are in exactly the situation you laid out. Without a real alternative, not tourism service industry, maybe not even heavy industry, coal country folks lives will just get worse. Kentucky was trying back in the early 2010s, and folk like Appalshop in Whitesburg are pushing for change. But the solution is going to look nothing like the past. That change is going to be scary for some folk.
Agreed. My dad's family goes back to before white people in Appalachia (north) and helped start the WHiskey Rebellion. Most still remain rural, in what's left after strip mines, shaft mines, quarries, logging. WHich is to say, I was raised to hunt and gather my food, b/c money? Pfft, that wasn't gonna happen. Yet people cling to the idea of "we had it good in coal days". Like heck they/we did!
Maybe the solution is for the government to begin a huge restoration of America's road and highway network, as well as environmental restoration from previous polluting industries? Cleaning up failed cities, towns and suburbs and investing in non polluting clean, renewable energy production. This would create millions of jobs and revitalize American manufacturing industries that could manufacture all the required building materials..
Roosevelt did it after the great depression and America was reborn.
It CAN happen again but Donald Rump doesn't have the ability to do it because despite what he says, he doesn't care about the ordinary workers of the USA.
My grandfather was a coal miner in Pike County, Kentucky after returning from Army service in World War II, as generations of men of his family were before him. He died of lung cancer before he could turn forty, and on his oldest child, my mother's, 16th birthday. The youngest of his five children was nine at the time. His wife, my grandmother, had a sixth grade education and supported those kids by waiting tables in a local diner. I still have so many family members clinging to coal and supporting Trump as a result, and it breaks my heart. Appalachia was about poor people finding a place to live a simple life, undisturbed, before Big Coal came in (from outside) and somehow convinced us that *that* was our heritage as hillbillies. Coal keeps killing us. It's time to find another way.
thank you for a great and simple telling of the truth for so many.
Thorium or Nuclear in general is the "another way" for power, for the people it's internet and remote work. I live in Kentucky and the idea of people making less then $20 an hour to get black lung is deeply offensive to me. You can make as much doing customer service as a coal miner can with none of the risk.
I started out in the backwoods of Oregon where every generation worked in the sawmill or the woods. My grandma picked crab down at the docks for blood poisoning. Someone else got rich outa that labor. My dad got a job as deckhand on the Alaska supply boats and we thought we were in clover. Yep, a hamburger every Saturday at the bowling alley was a big deal! Until it shut down. I got a job waiting tables at Pizza Hut instead of college. Mom became a directory assistance operator for $115 a week. Dad couldn't find a job.
Them good old days did not amount to a hill o beans as far as I am concerned. It was a terrible weight creating cushy lives for the Corporate Succubus Slavers.
If I grew up there and knew I faced a lifetime of working in a coal mine, I'd run screaming into the woods... 😵💫
This is why we need people like Trae - to give a rational yet sympathetic depiction of a problem and a reasonable solution. Love ya like southern fried chicken with all the fixings.
“Living in coal country is no different than anywhere else in this country. In most southern states it’s equally helpless. Young people leave at the first opportunity. Just because your dad, grand dad, and great grad dad, did a certain job doesn’t mean you have to. But I get your point. There needs to better job training, college or trade school options so young people will feel like they have more options after high school.
It's not all about doing the same job as their forebears, but it is also about their unwillingness to leave the same land as their forebears who first settled there. For instance, many coal miners in the South were of Irish origin. It took a famine in Ireland and starvation to force them to leave their homeland. I suspect that it would take another to force their descendants to leave their current homes before they'd be willing to look elsewhere for work.
@@laurie7689it's even bigger than that. I grew up in coal country. Left and got all the education you could ask for (a Ph.D. in the hard sciences). I do well for myself on paper, but the general higher cost of living, distance from family, and the higher cost that comes from not being able to sharing things with them make it more or less a wash.
The only plausible solutions for coal country involve new ways to make coal country profitable, leading to good livelihoods for the people that live there. Most of the "get educated" options involve moving away to be gainfully employed, which isn't actually a solution for coal country.
@@Huffman-uc8ux I agree. I mentioned elsewhere in another thread that the main problem was the inequity in job availability across the USA. The South has more of the low level, lower decent wage jobs available than other places do. For those Southerners who become educated and want better jobs with better pay, they have to leave the South. Places like Silicon Valley hoard tech jobs. Places like Wall Street hoard financial jobs. Unless jobs are spread out more, our economy and the housing industry is going to keep hurting.
@@laurie7689remote work is changing that. I know two people from the north who've moved to cheaper land in the south and work remotely. Both are in the tech sector.
@@RecklessFables Northerners working remotely in the South, but not Southerners. It is the poor Southerners that are left out of job opportunities. Most only know how to do physical labor. That can't be done remotely and there are fewer of those jobs every day as they are being replaced by tech. The education system in the South is so far behind now that it is like that of a third world country. Even if the South started pouring what little money they have (after all, they are the poorest States in the Union) into education, they'll never catch up to the other States. Businesses will continue to avoid the South for lack of an educated workforce. That will keep the job opportunities away from the South and continue to keep Southerners poor. It's a vicious cycle.
That is so 100 percent true. Everything that man said is the reason why my parents left West Virginia in 1951. Nothing to do but go underground to dig black gold and die. And today in 2023 it is still the same. A sad reality of continuous poverty for generations.
I grew up in a tiny little town in Texas and there wasn't anything there. The career choices are similar...I joined the Air Force when I graduated and got the heck out of there. I knew well enough, even at that age, that there wouldn't be much of a future if I stayed. Now I've lived in Japan and Germany and travelled all over the world. I don't regret my decision to leave at all. I don't even have my red neck accent anymore.
My family lived through the industrial death of Glasgow in Scotland as it became ever more clear that steam power was disappearing and heavy steel construction was going to other countries like the USA. My father and mother made the decision to move to another country that had more opportunities for the work they could do and also have a healthier environment for their children to grow up in. They chose Australia and it worked out well for us children but it was quite a price to pay for my parents because they never saw the family back in Scotland again before they died. Nothing stays the same forever and trying to hang on for the glory days to return is fools gold. Glasgow is still there and a very nice city it is without all the belching chimneys but its workforce is not doing what they did when my parents left and the transition took a very long time.
Glasgow is very nice. I grew up in England and the thing I remember was the smell of coal. Actually I remembered it after I went back. We moved to the US but when I go back there it doesn’t smell like that much now if at all. Coal smoke reminds me of my childhood 🙃
Obama wanted to put a solar panel plant in WV. The people didn’t seem to want it. The local politicians definitely didn’t want it. I have a feeling the money people didn’t want a higher paying plant there. But maybe they have come to realize coal is not coming back. Many of these coal town have really deteriorated. Big drug problems and the community infrastructure is in bad shape. But they could sure use the help. I live in PA and some former coal towns here are as bad as WV.
We've been through that here in England in the North and Midlands in the 1980s. We watched them close down one pit after another and tell proud miners their skills aren't needed any more and they have to go looking for other jobs. The North and Midlands have still not recovered and have the poorest communities in the country even though they were the ones that made the British Empire and the British industrial revolution possible. All the money ever earned down those pits ended up somewhere else.
I did hear how some miners ended up digging the Channel Tunnel and others went to Africa and mined there.
Just watched them blowing up Cottam power station.
They got they're share for raping the earth.
The miners never saw much money from the enormous amounts earned from such efforts. The coal rights were bought cheap, mined cheap and sold to the highest bidders with little regard for the miners and their families. My grandfather was a miner and told his sons not to work in the mines, and that was in the 60’s. Looks like he was way ahead in knowing the truth
My Grandfather died from Black Lung before I was born. That was on 1952 . Today the town is full of office buildings and tech firms
The coal mine is just a tourist attraction.
Your grandfather's story is repeated thousands of times. I remember as a kid in the 60s seeing retired miners, toothless wrecks, struggling to breathe while sitting on park benches. They would spit on the ground and the spittle would be black. Those guys didn't last long.
Yet any claim for compensation was met with: "You have to prove the coal dust caused that condition and killed him." Impossible for a family who depended on that miner's salary to eat. Same for those who worked in the coke industry. Daily exposure to those toxic fumes led to multiple lung and skin cancer cases. Same story: "You prove it."
Fast forward a few decades and we hear: "Car exhausts are causing thousands of premature deaths, you have to pay to drive in the city." Meanwhile, 70% of British waterways are contaminated with raw sewage.
Those rabbit hutches they built for the miners and steel workers are still standing in Wales (Some even had running water). I can't imagine what kind of dwellings there would be there if even if a quarter of the money made had been reinvested locally.
It is about the money, always was. They get interested and concerned when they find a way to get the money flowing towards them. It's then we get the 'save the planet' mantra.
I didn't grow up in coal country, but I did grow up in a dying mill town. Lots of it plays out the same way. My home town is now about 40% the size it was when I was born. No good paying jobs left. The working class needs a better deal.
Then definitely DON"T vote Democrat
@@jamesholden6142 Well I certainly can't vote Republican.
@@jamesholden6142LOL. You've learned nothing. You just admitted this is your fault.
@@java4653That's bullshit. What jobs have the GOP created? Trickle down economics is a lie. This nation is a corporate oligarchy. Both parties are to blame. They're criminal gangs.
@@java4653 Poor thing; you can see the lies and corruption in other groups but cant recognize it in your own. The funny thing is, if I pressed you on it you'd probably be conscious of the fact that the two-party system is a con played on the American people but good luck getting you to internalize that knowledge and to stop voting for party cronies all-together
I'm from Illinois, but even as a kid, I had a fair idea of what life in coal country was like. I read a lot, I saw movies like The Molly Maguires, and I visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, with its seriously realistic fake coal mine ride. I grew up listening to country music in the sixties and seventies, and some of my favorite artists came from coal country, and I learned about their lives. No, nothing you've said here is news to me, but I do agree that more people need to know about it.
Illinois is an interesting mix once you leave Chicago. It's manufacturing, farming, and coal mines. Living in Central Illinois and driving both dry van and frameless dumps I got a taste of all of it. I'm just a big believer that if you want to help people you have to walk in their shoes for a bit. You also need to see the world through their eyes.
I'm in Southern Illinois and I know coal mining is very hard work but I also know most of them earn around $80,000/year which is very good money in these parts. Now there are new factories going in in some of the bigger towns like Marion, Carbondale, Herrin and a few others and workers can make anout $16/hour. So you see factories will starve you to death at least in coal mines you can afford to eat food, buy a house, keep the lights on and save money for retirement which in a factory you can't do more than one of these things at a time.
@@mattd.4133The thing about coal mining in places like Illinois, unlike Appalachia is that you aren't cut off from the rest of civilization. So that $80k goes a lot farther than dealing with living in a company town. The miners I was around at Viper were more upset about the old equipment and idiot truck drivers than career choice, or pay.
@@thechristianboomer oh yeah a company town would be horrible and we had those here too but that was a long time ago.Most of our mines are shut down and our communities are falling apart because the only thing replacing the coal jobs is very low pay factory work. If you don't have a skill you are screwed. The towns all around here are literally falling apart and we are no where near Chicago.
The major railroads that used to derive a large chunk of change from hauling black diamonds have already read the writing on the wall that coal is a dying industry. Both CSX and Norfolk Southern have stopped ordering new hopper cars and are just running the life out of the existing rolling stock.
I’ve spent my entire life in WV. The natural gas industry has kept our part of the state afloat for a while now, but there aren’t a whole lot of other viable options. It’s far worse in coal country. Jobs are useless if they don’t pay a living wage, and there unfortunately aren’t too many companies willing to open up shop for the residents of southern WV.
So, coal reigns supreme, even if it’s never brought anything good to anyone here. It’s heartbreaking to see, but life isn’t that much different in that part of the state than it was with company towns 100 years ago.
One of the best documentaries on the coal industry is called, "The Mine Wars" produced for PBS through the series, "The American Experience". Definitely worth watching! A real education!
First of all, I don't believe anything that PBS puts out on anything because they are nothing but a socialist, leftist arm of the Democratic Party that does nothing for truth, but provides propaganda. They have no centralist agenda. Second, I come from a family of coal miners for at least four generations and three generations in the steel industry that depended on coal. I can't figure out this Trae Crowder on what he is trying to say or what side he is on because he talks about the evils of the New Green Deal and what bad things coal does to land. Also, my experience dealing with the coal unions, their hourly rate was always higher than other crafts and that the union's safety programs and apprentice programs taught safe mining and was very strict. There was no mention of open pit mining which is much safer and underground mining is not the only way to extract coal from the ground. I found less than half truths in this video and I still don't know what it was about. I would grade it a C- for being incomplete.
PBS has the best documentaries!
@@1Kent Yep, if you like a leftist propaganda slant.
A person with transferable skills is valuable to themselves, their family, and society. A person raised with a single skill, or one that is labor intensive, or is simply uneducated is probably unprofitable in the long run for all.....except to those who would take advantage of them.
Have you seen Jordan Peterson's interview on cognitive inequality?
Y have zero respect for that human@@philipmcniel4908
I grew up over coal mines. My high school had to be condemned because of sinkholes. A sinkhole caused by mine subsidence appeared in our yard overnight when I was a kid. It was the size of a car.
Phenomenal video. It has the perfect level of detail and relatability for wide appreciation.
And yet four days into it's release it has less than 300 likes. That's depressing. Maybe it's just that this channel is new? Whatever, please keep up the great writing and thoughtful discussion. I really hope this channel and Southin' Off grow to nearly unmanageable proportions. May you all get big enough to create massive scandals for making minor missteps and be tempted to sell out.
Both my Grandfathers went to the coal mines in the 1930s, both smoked cigarets.
One drank a lot died in his 50s of a stroke before cancer got him, the other died of lung cancer. One Aunt was a heavy smoker died of lung cancer in her 40s
So. Coal and tobacco. Bad news.
And yes we had relatives in Pennsylvania coal country that died young that got family jobs when there were none here.
Facing also gave us the Koch Brothers, now the Koch foundation, Conservative enemies of the country!
Fracking, spell check fracking
I lost a great-grandfather and several great-Uncles to black lung and the coal industry. I and my family are from Oklahoma, and we're still dealing with the environmental ramifications of that mining over 100 years later.
This reminds me of the paper industry in northeast Wisconsin, except no one coddled those people when the Koch brothers bought the industry and moved it overseas, leaving a whole generation of workers wondering what to do.
when you raise taxes and come up with a bunch of unnecessary regulations on an industry, it will move somewhere that will give it tax breaks and not try to kill it with regulations. In other words, don't vote Democrat and expect industry to stay in the U.S.
@jamesholden6142 What I would point out, though, is that in order to outcompete international competitors when it comes to deregulation, we would have to allow companies to cut wages even further (and we all know they already not high enough), let them reduce worker protections, and just generally create horrible conditions of employment. Those are conditions employers want. So I think the solution needs balance, we need to work with businesses to a certain extent, but not to the point where we sacrifice workers' rights.
@@ADubbs-fd8xfYou know, business can't move overseas if the state owns at least part of the business, by doing a China strategy and forcing by law for large companies to have a fraction of the ownership be by the state government it would make it unfeasible for them to pack it up and leave to Laos or whatever.
I think that was the point of Trump's ideas... Less regulation will bring American jobs back. Whether coal mining returns to its "glory days" or not was never the plan. It was more about not purposely killing it with ridiculous Green New Deal garbage. When the gov subsidies a project, it inevitably fails. When the gov regulates an industry, it moves to other countries. When the gov taxes a business, those taxes get transferred to the end user.
Democrat politicians impose regulation, subsidies, and taxes that have devastated our economy for years. There is no promise that Trump's ideas work, but at least there's HOPE!
I was born in Decatur, Illinois. All of the older parts of that city have early coal mines underneath. There’s decent bituminous coal , somewhat high in sulfur, under almost all of the middle of Illinois; a lot is around 600 feet down. A nearby town, Mowequa, had 54 miners killed on the day before Christmas in 1932 due to a methane explosion, but I think that the mines in Decatur were from 1860 or so to maybe the turn of the century?
There was strip mining where it was practical, sometimes with deep mines nearby (Kickapoo State Park near Danville shows the scars). I think that Illinois coal was more for relatively local use, though: farming was always a lot more important than mining. Decatur was quite the industrial center for a while, and still is to a degree, so although there’s coal under everyone’s feet in the middle of Illinois it has never been properly coal country.
Having lived in eastern Kentucky my whole life, this is certainly true. What happens more than anything is there are companies that attempt to create new jobs around here but then they get the runaround from the local government who is most likely in bed with the coal industry until they finally give up. This happened a few years ago when a battery manufacturer was trying to create a new factory. They eventually gave up and went elsewhere.
What needs to happen around here is get the old money people out of office and a new breed of people in who want to see this beautiful area thrive. I myself have stayed out of the mining industry although the temptation has been great due to the pay being so much better, but I like having the steady work other than the coal companies having layoffs whenever they choose.
I lived in Hazard, KY, in 1984. I remember driving thru some 'hollers' where there were once coal towns with populations in the high hundreds. By 1980, there were only a few dozen families. It was hard to imagine what was once there.
The challenge is that for a starting point, we have a relatively large population of skilled workers, but they are widely spread out over a very rugged geographic area. I see many good ideas in the comments, but they don't scale well over such a large region.
If coal had never been discovered in this region, what would the pattern of settlement have looked like today? Would the population have been much smaller? What would the population have been doing to support themselves? Is there a pathway now to get to that point?
Wales, aka UK Applachia, is reviving the UK car industry by developing a new electric car. Now, Credit may have f-ed that up, but I still see it as a ray of hope.
Hey Cousin, As the former red necks (Union Coal Miners), descend into the mine in their squatty grinding trucks they are chasing thinner and thinner seams of coal. This means that they are chewing up more and more rock at the edges of those thin seams. That rock typically has silica in it. Mining that stuff creates more silica dust than when Papaw was down there, and the silica is more deadly than the black lung. Put the red bandanas back on and demand the infrastructure jobs as welders, electricians, etc. that the dems are promising.
Are those new infrastructure jobs in the community? If not, don't expect them to ask for those jobs. Those people have been settled in that region for many generations. They're not going to get up and leave to where the jobs are.
@@laurie7689, this is what I don't understand -- why not get up and go where the jobs are? That's what everyone else does. This has been the solution for thousands of years all over the planet.
@sandracraft517 It's also more expensive than ever in this country to move and start over somewhere else. Poverty doesn't just take away your ability to provide for yourself and your family, it takes away many of the options you might pursue to climb out of poverty itself. That's not even accounting for people who simply don't want to leave the places where their families have been for years; it's hard to just pick up and move somewhere new when you already don't have the resources to live well where you're at. Particularly considering how the housing crisis the US is perpetually in these days -- largely due to concentration of ownership in the hands of investment capital firms and wealthy older Americans -- how do you go from struggling to live in an extremely poor area which at least likely has the benefit of low property values and cheap cost of living, to moving to a much more affluent area which, yes, COULD offer a better paying wage, but also will drain you of even more resources in the immediate near term? A person moving for work could very well end up in a better situation long term, but how do they scrounge up the money to move in the first place? Economics have a funny way of limiting a person's freedom of option.
@@sandracraft517 As the responder explains after your question, the issue is one about the economics of moving. It would be one thing if all places were the same and the cost of living in each place was the same, but they are not. For instance: I live in the State of Alabama. It has a low cost of living. In this State, I'm considered to be lower middle class. Let's say I wanted to move from here to another State to get a better job since this State lacks jobs (I don't, but for the sake of the example, we'll say I do), then I'd be moving from a low cost of living State to a State with a higher cost of living (most US States have a higher cost of living than Alabama does). I would automatically, just from moving to a different location, become impoverished. Just my moving would place me into the category of being in poverty rather than low middle-class. Now, imagine somebody that is already impoverished in a low cost of living State, but at least still has a roof over their heads. Moving to a higher cost of living State could mean that they'd end up living on the street as a homeless person. One of the main issues is that there is no equity in the availability of jobs from State to State. Low cost of living States generally have low-paying jobs and fewer jobs available, but more people can afford a roof over their heads. I could never leave the State of Alabama to another State with a higher cost of living, even for a better job, without the real risk of becoming homeless. When you have a family, you don't want to take that risk. So, we sit and stagnate instead.
@@aeschafer1, I'm well aware, from personal experience, how poverty limits people. But poor people in bad situations light out all the time for places they hope will be better, it's the history of immigration. It's happening now at the southern border, with people who have less and are risking more than anyone in the Appalachias. I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's gone on constantly all thru human history. So as an excuse, it kind of rings hollow.
Here in Australia, and particularly where I live, coal is still king. I fear that this is our future too, but you can't tell anybody this. The answer you get is "the coal ain't ever gunna run out". They can't see that the coal may not run out, but the demand very well may, and we will be left with nothing but big holes where the open cut mines were.
Nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground 🙄
@@coryburris8211 Absolutely! Different mineral but same sentiment.
The Stone Age didn’t end because the world ran out of stone, and the coal age didn’t end became the world ran out of coal, both ended because of technological improvements due the ingenuity of mankind.
Thanks Trae for once again telling it like it is.
I was a fourth generation coal miner and worked in mines in Germany, the UK, Canada, US and Mexico. Trust me, this is dangerous work and there is nothing clean about it from extraction, transport and finally burning it for whatever purposes. The legacy- or ‘for ever’ costs are staggering and will burden society for all future. I am glad I got out of that line of work and retired after a long career in the clean and renewable energy industry! People in the traditional coal mining areas have to be educated to break the cycle of ‘my daddy was a miner and that’s all I want to be, too’!
So, we already have these holes in the ground...underground tends to keep a steady, cooler temperature...certain things like server farms and lithium battery storage facilities need steady cooler temperatures to run efficiently. We need better infrastructure to get the data and/or energy from Appalachia to the cities on the coastal planes, but Appalachia needs that infrastructure to start with anyway...and it is not that far from the Blue Ridge to Washington, DC or Raleigh or Pittsburgh, seriously. Also, the potential for pumped storage hydropower is huge in that area, and they already blew the tops off some mountains, so that's half way to a reservoir. Now if you were to install floating solar farms on those reservoirs, you can use the solar energy during the day to pump the water up the mountain as well as run the server farms.
Mine shafts are perfect for KINETIC BATTERIES. Where does the power come from? It could come from mountain streams, or solar, but you could just store cheep off-peak cheep grid electricity, and sell it back to the grid during peak load times.
Continuing to Destroy Appalachia will be the Death of Everyone on this Planet.
I'm not an engineer or anything, but that sounds rational. It's much better than building gigantic server farms in the damn deserts of Arizona and using millions of gallons of water a day in a place where water is very scarce. Maybe non-existent soon.
A few "holes in the ground" have been converted for growing mushrooms.
ha ha .. obviously you've never been in a real coal mine !! and totally ignorant ... I'm sure you'd wanna live in one those 120 year old coal mines running your "server farm" in all that coal dust and constant seepage of water. Those servers would be dead within 24 hours ... #CLUELESS #SCARECROW
My whole family was from WV. Coal miners, Union Carbide alumni, among other occupations. Everyone, one generation behind me, was smart enough to get college educated and get out. None of my family, aside from second cousins, lives in WV. I still take trips to rock climb in WV at Seneca Rock or the New River Gorge, but there is no way anyone in my family would ever consider moving back.
Dad was from Appalachia. Mom had some of those tokens the coal companies use to pay their workers. Not sure if she still has them. I was telling a lady at work about being paid in tokens only good at the company store and company housing and she thought that sounded like a nice way to simplify life.
With price hikes and authoritarian controls. No thanks
My great grandfather was a coal miner in southern West Virginia. He would have to travel back and forth from southwest VA to the mines to keep a roof over his family's heads, meanwhile great grandma worked cleaning houses. I used to think being a descendant of a coal miner is a good thing meaning I come from a line of hard workers, but knowing the condition of the mines puts a damper on it. It was the only job he could get at the time.
The title “It’s time to be honest with coal country.“ says it all. Coal has a storied history but times change, it isn’t the future. Lying politicians give false hope that keeps people stuck. Just be honest. Anybody that can work that hard in a mine can be successful at anything.
Adapt, or be left behind. That's life, get used to it, because it doesn't get any better.
Thanks Trae, and this channel 😊
Hear, hear! I second the motion and promptly yield the floor to the next in favor of favorin' Trae and crew!
Nobody can escalate my hate for the way the owning class will make the environments that keep these coal miners in such desperate condition. We are all American and none should aim to exploit others in this way.
Here in Holland we had coal mines too. The miners were lead to believe that they earned more money underground than they could do above it. The difference however was marginal, if you concider what a hellish job they had to do. It was more that they did not have an alternative in the region. One of my uncles died of silicose, he basically suffocated from the dust he inhaled. After the war, the miners were asked to work extra hard to rebuild the country. Their pride however took a serious hit, when they found out that the former SS prisoners of war were employed as forced labourers in the mines too. If the SS were punished by sending them to an underground hell, then why were the miners down there too?
If you two are teaming up on this channel, I'm signing up! This will be a welcome addition to the other honest RUclipsrs I follow!
I am 73 so I am writing about things that happened a long time ago....my grandfather on my dad's side of the family lost his leg in a mining accident....my dad, then 16, dropped out of high school to work in the mines and basically took charge of the family...one of my mother's brothers died in the mines when a piece of heavy equipment fell on him and crushed him...to his dying day, my dad heated the 'Johnny Bulls' who owned the mines and ran the mining towns...there has never been a golden age of coal mining...and, as this video points out, the Green New Deal is maybe the best hope for these people. Trump with his false promises that only enriched the mine owners--may he rot in hell.
Outsourcing, union busting, automation etc., changed the face of working most especially for blue collar labor. It will be interesting to see how the white collar types deal with the AI challenge. If we are smart, lucky, and have good governance, it can be a win perhaps
Don't hole your breath for that win.
I think with automation! Never thought I would say this! but I think some day automation will be readily available for the small companies an small independent because with automation we can scale down the automation and actually be able to compete with the big monopoly, working class people might be able to take back some of the economy from the corporations, sorry for the why I stated this hope its understandable
In the steel/coal Upper Ohio Valley. Thanks for doing this video.
The other thing to keep in mind is that it's not environmental regulations, green energy, or any of that stuff that is killing coal jobs. It's mechanization, methods like longwall mining. While demand for coal has decreased a good bit, the number of workers needed to dig up that coal is a tiny fraction what it was in the "good old days." But I doubt any of the old coal miners would say that's a bad thing, mines are a terrible place for humans, and those were never "good" jobs.
Thank you for these. Very informative.
My great-grandfather got his leg crushed while working in the WV coal mines. He was 14. Had a limp until his death nine decades later.
Coal employment peaked in the 1920s, but coal production kept rising until the 2010s. The mining companies just used machines instead of people, because machines were cheaper.
"...machines were cheaper."
Machines don't get black lung, either. I can't say that replacing people with machines is altogether a bad idea.
I don't have a problem with that. Injuries were all to common and frequently deadly or debilitating.
i've known coal people. they all said the same damned things to me: lax safety regs because profits first, last, and always; unions co-opted/bought off/bullied and broken; apathetic people who allowed govt to work for coal companies rather than them - the people. @@PhilJonesIII
I think the military guy made the right choice.
It sure has the best job security!
Used to run more, but even today I brought home a piece of coal. My friend gives me what he finds by the rail.
They're just closing one after another coal fired power plants, and certainly arent building any new ones. Naybe in China, but they have their own coal. 😮
That one song that says “I owe my soul to the company store” literally tells you everything you need to know about this extremely exploitative industry.
16 tons right?
Mr. Crowder, thank you for your service to this country - nothing more valuable than the truth!
Two great men here. Living in the rural Midwest I totally get this. My area is being turned into a sacrifice zone instead of the potential it could be with alternative fuels, alternative energy and growing hemp for fiber and concrete strengtheners.
We can't continue to export our youth to crowded cities and suburbs while rural America is in decay. Ignoring rural America is what allowed Trump and the GOP to set up shop. We need to bring back labor with the Democrat Farmer Labor party like what my neighbor to the West Minnesota had. I live in western Wisconsin.
Well, a lot of the places that are currently growing are projected to have ever-increasing issues with water scarcity, heat waves, and natural disasters. I'm actually pretty optimistic about the Midwest's prospects in the long term.
I had nearly 30 years in mines and loved it. The challenge of the job was only second to the great guys you worked with. Everyone had each others back all the time ... whether you liked them or not.
Finally someone with a platform makes the point that everyone in a mine isn’t just hitting rocks with a hammer and that the answer to losing coal jobs isn’t just “computers”. Coal sucks sure, but there’s people from all sorts of occupational fields in there and they’re going to need that alleged shiny new job to actually be in their field or it’s useless.
People have migrated throughout history for better opportunities or personal safety. All of my grandparents and their sibblings fled Russia around 125 years ago. And I'm glad they did. Leaving appalachia may be a wise choice for many.
The long downturn in Coal Mining Employment starting in the early 1920's was caused by more efficient mining methods. Getting rid of the ponies, using electric trolleys, cutting machines and shuttle buggies cut inside employment. The end of WW 1 had already cut employment and the tipples now used conveyors and other means to move coal cheaply.
Electric power, and energy for the trains still depended on coal. Many houses depended on coal for heat, cooking and hot water. Every year more of the miners were laid off due to an improvement in machines. During the depression, The demand for coal was reduced by the economic situation. 1937-38 saw the government eyes open to the world situation and the mines were booming until 1945-46. Even after that for a few years, demand was up to replace cars not sold because of the war. Then Korea for 3 years. Then another bust cycle for coal.
The coal companies installed continuous miners and more jobs went away. Later Long wall miners were installed with 20 men doing the job of 500 1920 era miners. Rail shifted completely away from coal in the late 50's. In the 50's and 60's the young people fled to big cities and the south. All that was left was steam coal to produce electricity and metallurgical coal for conversion to coke (for Steel). The Marshall plan starting in 1948 enabled Europe and Japan to construct new more efficient steel mills and they under cut US prices, driving US Steel and others out of business. I lived in the coal fields and remember the trainloads of new modern equipment brought in during miners vacation and the strikes. It was not a happy place.
Coal has always been a source of profit for outsiders, never for the actual producers. Thanks to mechanization the trend of the past fifty years has been more and more coal produced by fewer and fewer people paid to produce it. The people who have the mines have the money, they can buy whatever influence in local politics they need to make sure things continue to work to their benefit. They benefit from keeping the state poor and other industries out, so that as older generations of workers die off or retire there is a constant stream of replacements who see the mines as their only way out of absolute poverty. The wealth gets exported out of the state but we get to keep the environmental problems forever.
When a new industry does arrive it never seems to help us out. People thought the Marcellus Shale gas boom was going to turn things around. All that happened was, a few wealthy people (mostly from other states) set up corporations to buy mineral rights for a fraction of the real value. West Virginians hoped to get good paying jobs in the industry at least, but instead the well companies brought people from Texas or Oklahoma or Mexico who already had experience. We got a boom in fast food jobs feeding outsiders who are getting fat paychecks to exploit our state. That and a boom in housing prices as people with money bought up all the houses in order to rent them to oil and gas workers.
New technology doesn't seem like a panacea either. Almost everything high tech is either manufactured overseas and shipped here, or requires raw materials that have to be shipped from elsewhere. It costs about $2000 to ship a container from China to California. Once in California it costs $1-4 per mile to move it farther inland, There is a reason most of our development is in huge cities on the coast, and it isn't just the sunny weather. Why would they pay big money to ship parts into a mountainous inland area with lousy infrastructure and a poorly educated population when they can just build another factory on the coast?
an excellent explanation of why even new industries will find it hard to make a go of it in Appalachia
He is spot on. Green has to build in red.
I've lived in WV since 1993...I moved here from Youngstown OH...it was like stepping into a time machine...it hasn't gotten better...
Thank you for being honest. Someone finally needed to be real and say it.
In the 60s we had an across field neighbor who'd been caught in a coalmine cave in, who was confined to a wheelchair.
My maternal Grandfather started working around the mines as a boy. He eventually moved to Chicago for other opportunities.
My maternal Grandmother's 2nd husband was a coalminer in a small town. He took over the job of their explosives handler and setter. During a blasting operation, he was badly burned due there being a gas pocket behind the coal face they needed to blast loose. My grandmother received the widows compensation for him having Black Lung.
That mine wasn't far from the tiny farm they owned. A shaft runs under a paved road and still active railroad tracks and under part on the back of the property, how do I know? That area has sunk below the level of the rest of the property.
This same mine was on fire back through the 1980s. I doubt that it's been put out unless the coal seam has been consumed.
The coal company back in the 70s had the biggest dragline for awhile.
The bucket could hold 2 pickup trucks. It was electric and the extension cord was about 2 ft thick.
The path they followed eventually took away a local peach orchard.
I visited years later, and the reclaimed land didn't match with my childhood memories of the lay of the land and no landmarks from my childhood remain.
This was in Indiana.
It is obscene how much wealth has been taken out of WVa. with little for the locals.
Grew up in a Lumber town in Northern California. More than 20 years ago, after they shut down the last one they built a couple prisons for employment.
Sure was a nice community back in the day.
Any location that relies on natural resources will eventually run out of those resources. Here in Minnesota there was white pine from Mpls to Canada, cut most of them down. Iron mines - now taconite mines. Every thing changes all the time.
My grandfather started coal mining when he was only 12. I remember he got emotional one Saturday morning when “In the News” ran a spot about child miners. He was a man full of stories-but not about coal mining.
Very thoughtful comments - my grandfather was a coal miner in West Virginia, as were many of his friends and extended family, and nobody ever said they wanted their kids to do anything but go to college or learn a trade that would keep them out of the mines. My grandmother used to tell me stories about the people on their street losing family members in mining accidents, and my grandfather contracted black lung, though he died after he retired.
My grandfather was at thw Battle of Blair Mountain, an orignal red neck.
He got nothing for his fight, other than a wrecked body and poberty.
On average coal production and usage have gone down about 8% per year for the last 20 years. Mining jobs is at 40% than that of 40years ago. There was a federal program to train miners in occupations equivalent to what they were making. It was discontinued, want to guess when. Now for a fun fact. 5 years ago the National Coal Museum went solar. So yeah the industry knows it's on borrowed time. They just want to leech everything they can from the miners.
We’re researching recovery of rare earth minerals from culm banks and clay beds.
The most important thing in this vid (of many) is acknowledging that most coal jobs can 100% translate to other fields if the jobs simply existed in the area. Plenty of liberal city folk (myself included) still envision coal miners as well miners doing most of the labor manually with pickaxes and shit. It would be a lot easier to appeal to these people if you said hey what of instead of being in a cramped mine slowly murdering yourself fixing machine A we have you go to this new building with like ventilation and shit to fix machine B. Like this seems like a highly skilled work force treat them like it.
alot of feminists would just say those miners are working hard in mines to provide for families are just compensating like gretta. the thing about renewables to be honest about is it will NEVER be 24/7/365 period! Coal plants can have up to 90 days of coal supply which is great to get through winter months and some summer. once everything is done and settled about the jobs issue union trades jobs pay more on average than tech jobs while tech jobs have much more risk and adaption needed on a continual basis. will those feminists go that high risk high adaptation route and compete with all those H1B visa Indian and Chinese tech workers?
I think part of the divide between coal towns and the rest of us is that expectation that generations of their family should work in the same industry. There is NO place in the United States that has that idea (except maybe a few farmers). Everyone else is busy scrapping and scraping by on a fluctuating job market.
Not necessarily in the same industry, but in the same community. If, however, the coal industry is all there is in that community, then that is where they'll work. Most small places only ever have one industry for employment. Once that industry is gone, the town dies an agonizing death and the people that are left suffer. Most people aren't willing to pick up and move to find work elsewhere. They'll just wait for work to come to them or they'll stay jobless and on government welfare.
They used to have jobs where men walked down the streets and picked up horse shit but, you know, technology changed. I’m sure there were plenty of sad boys who realized they weren’t going to be able to walk in daddy’s squishy footsteps.
My father’s from Eastern Kentucky, coal country. Though he never worked in the mines, when we have visited that region you hear stories of mine closings and layoffs. It’s pretty desperate down there. People seem to be thankful for a job at McDonalds.
Here in the UK our biggest power station Drax in Yorkshire sits on a massive anthracite seam and they are burning wood chips imported from BC six thousand miles away. Idiocy on stilts.
I read somewhere that that's what happened to the railways. They thought they were in the railways sector, as opposed to the transportation sector. Trucks soon swamped them.
These communities thought they were in the coal sector, as opposed to the energy sector. Paradigm shifts are brutal and unforgiving.
Actually, the last part of the video pretty much describes my life. And I did adopt, and frankly, I am the better off for it.
I mean, aren't we all just trying to get by, after the promises of our youth were found to be basically empty? Coal miners are not special in this regard, but that's not a bad thing at all. I had a moderately successful career that turned into ash, and I have been forced to scramble to find some other way to pay the bills in my early 40s. Now I am in the last 4 months of a 3-year healthcare program at a local college, and I don't think there's any risk of this job disappearing, as despite plenty of people training in it over the last decade, the demand has outstripped the supply, due to the vast size of the baby boom bubble growing old and needing...health care. We are all facing the same economic insecurity, and it would be better to face it in a unified way, rather than trying to go it on our own. The future will require us to be creative, to find ways to make ends meet, and coal miners are in no way unique in this regard. Unfortunately, until we use people power to defeat the excesses of capital, exploitation will always be the name of the game.
My folks are from coal mining country in Staffordshire England. I remember my uncle Eddie lying on a bed in the kitchen of their house unable to even get to the outhouse for a s**t. All he could do was cough up black crap and gasp for air. I was 5 years oold and so glad my Dad took the option of the military. Now the mines have closed, but the village is derelict with the few shops boarded up and empty houses everywhere. The site of the mine, well awy from the derelict village has been transformed into Luxury home for wealthy commuters from nearby Manchester and Birmingham, do the know their fancy houses are biut on toxi waste and the graves of my ancestors? Do they care? Surely the sitie of the mine would have been better used for wind or solar generation.
Coal miners have some of the best sayings. Even now.
Regarding political realignment in 2016 also do not forget Pennsylvania. Coal country played a roll in that.
Feel bad for them but coal country is not the only part of the country going though this we all are. We all need living wage jobs.
My grandparents worked in the mines, so their children and grand children did not have to.
Coal mining is not a good job but the fact is we are still dependent on coal as a fuel source. The more they push for electric cars, trying to reduce the use of petroleum fuel, the greater the demand will be for coal.
yep ... and that just replaces POLLUTION from one source to another, it is not reduced
It doesn’t work that way. Coal power plants are being shut down as fast as they can because besides dirty, coal electricity is expensive. Gas, nuclear wind/battery and solar/battery are cheaper.
@@Carnutzjoe It is about availability. Currently 60% of electricity in US is created by fossil fuels with coal being around 20%. The other sources cannot just be turned up, they need to be constructed. That takes time to be available. But we use a great deal of energy with fossil fuel engines. Even if electric motors are much more efficient it is still a giant increase on the US electric grid, which is already overloaded. So once again the entire system needs to be rebuilt to handle much higher demands before you can just dump fossil fuels, including coal.
Wind and solar would need city size batteries to work. I think nuclear should be greatly increased to cover the gap for the next couple decades until other sources developed.
"...after all, I'm a Tennessee football fan "
Great line, Trae! As a UT alumnus I can certainly relate to that!
Love ya,
The Old Hippiebilly
Coal has been dying s slow death since the early 1900's because the demand has been drying up. Back in the early part of the 1900's coal was the predominant source of energy. Coal was used extensively in ocean going ships. If you look at the ocean liners of the day there would be hundreds of workers needed to shovel coal into the boilers to power the ship. Today's cruise ships are powered by diesel generators that require only a few people to maintain. Compared to other sources of energy coal is much more labor intensive and therefor more expensive to use.
Electric power plants use a huge amount. Train loads daily.
One very important point that was made in the video was that the coal miners are skilled labor and can learn whatever any corporation is willing to teach them. The problem is that corporate CEOs would rather whine about the lack of a ready made workforce than take them and train the workers or work with a union that would train the workers through an apprenticeship program to get them qualified. With a readymade workforce available in Appalachia that is willing to work and learn why do these alternate energy industries not want to relocate to Appalachia to develop their industries and build new or repurpose the available plants and industrial infrastructure?
My dad is 80. My dad chose the navy over coal, so did his brother. (He's also a Tennessee football fan 🙂)
😭💔😭 this made me cry. I grew up in west Virginia. My neighbor died of black lung at 55yrs old. Strip mining has really changed the landscape 😢 Love yall so much❤❤❤❤❤❤
my moms great-grandfather mined coal in Clearfield in Centere county PA right after he immigrated from the Austo-Hungarlian Empire for two years...the experience was SO bad he made all this children promise they would never mine. He left and became a glass-making artisan in what is now Jeanette PA