There's an excellent deep dive piece in the most recent New Yorker entitled "The Future of Coal Country"
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/03/the-future-of-coal-countryA lot of good insight in there (bottom line--automation and natural gas / renewables are mostly the cause of coal's decline), but there was one piece that really stuck with me. I've attached an excerpt below for reference.
They profile this couple in their early 30s with two daughters in living in rural PA. He works in the mine, she's a stay at home mom. They live in a home they rent from their company at $600 a month, a sweetheart deal even by local standards (of course, I checked). Recently, when his hours were cut down to 3 days a week, she had to start waitressing at 8 mos pregnant to make ends meet. When she had a C-section, they had to pay $8,000 out of pocket. They said they voted for Trump because they were voting for coal-- "We just need 10 more years" of coal, they say, because they've got car loans, and student loans, and kids.
This all seems pretty sympathetic, until you realize
HE WAS MAKING $110,000 A YEAR!!! After taxes, that's gotta be at least $80K. In rural PA! With no daycare and laughably tiny rent.
WHAT THE FUCK WERE THEY SPENDING THEIR MONEY ON? The only other detail they gave was that they were planning to take their daughters to Build-A-Bear to get bears that cost 80 bucks each.
And they "just need 10 more years"--To do what, exactly? If you can't build up savings earning money like that with a crazy cheap cost of living, what are you going to do in 10 more years?
And! And! Because they're renting a home from his employer, as soon as he loses his job (which he will sooner or later), they'll be broke AND homeless!
I just . . . I don't even know what to say. It blows my fucking mind.
Here's the full excerpt:
Among the marchers were Christina and Frank Zaccone, a married couple in their early thirties. Frank didn’t mind the cold: every workday, he travelled an hour underground to reach the face, where he sheared coal from the Pittsburgh seam. Christina was excited to be part of something, although she wished she’d designed a sign of her own, instead of simply carrying the one handed to her by a Consol public-relations employee. She and the other miners’ wives had been talking on the phone late into the night, while their husbands were underground, worrying about the lawsuit. Christina noted that the industry claimed the fight over the Bailey mine could cost as many as two thousand jobs. “That’s a lot of jobs lost over a stream,” she said. “My husband could lose his job over this for sure.”
Christina was a good ally for the mining industry, posting support on a Facebook page called “A Coal Miner’s Wife.” When I met her one morning, a few weeks after the protest, she suggested that the activists were outside agitators. “If this Center for Coalfield Justice was a bunch of farmers who grew up in Ryerson State Park, then I probably wouldn’t have marched,” she said. She suspected that Coptis was the only C.C.J. member who’d actually “set foot” in the county. She knew that the Sierra Club, based in California, was part of the suit. “I almost feel like they’re bullies,” she said. “Maybe that’s why Trump won, because people were getting bullied.”
She and Frank lived with their two young daughters near the town of Prosperity, in a red brick Colonial they rented from Consol. The house had once been worth a hundred thousand dollars, but in 2013 Consol, which was then buying properties in the area, paid more than eight times that amount, intending to rent it to employees, who were unlikely to complain about the effects of undermining. In subsequent years, mining spoiled the water supply and damaged the foundation. The Zaccones now rented the house for six hundred dollars a month and paid a local company to fill the water buffalo—a portable tank that sat on a trailer outside. “I’ve seen what coal does,” Christina said. “It’s not pretty, but it’s necessary.”
Frank, who had worked the graveyard shift, was still sleeping. The Zaccones were planning to take their daughters to the Build-a-Bear store that day, to fashion Teddy bears from the movie “Trolls.” The bears were expensive, eighty dollars apiece, but Frank made good money: a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year, enough to allow Christina to stay home. During the recent downturn in the industry, Frank’s work had dwindled to three days a week, and Christina, who was then eight months pregnant, had waited tables. Their deductibles shot up; when Christina needed a C-section, she had to pay eight thousand dollars out of pocket. Many miners blamed Obamacare for the change in insurance fees. Since companies were forced to help provide insurance for everyone in America, the argument went, they could no longer afford the same standard of care for employees.
The Zaccones voted for Trump. “We’re not a bunch of toothless, uneducated miners,” Christina said. Her daughters ran into the dining room; the older one, who was four, wore a T-shirt that read, “NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A GIRL.” “No one wants to repress anyone else, no one wants to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” she added. “We voted for coal here, and just crossed our fingers that Trump wouldn’t go too far.”
By the time Frank woke up, the girls had got into a box of doughnuts on the dining-room table. He rifled through, looking for a chocolate one. Voting for Trump was the first time he felt that his opinion mattered, he said: “People like me made it happen.” Since the election, his overtime hours had increased. Trump might not be able to change the market, but in the short term he could restore jobs. “Coal will never go back to the way it was, but if Trump cuts back on regulation he can give us jobs for the next ten years,” he said. “We’ve got car loans and school loans and kids,” Christina added. “Honest to God, if we can make it ten more years, we’re cool.” But ten more years of burning coal will continue to help drive up the earth’s temperature, as well as increase the costs of health problems from pollution, which in Pennsylvania have been estimated at more than six billion dollars a year.