As Coal Fades, What’s Next for Thousands of Miners?
A few months after the Emerald Mine closed, around a hundred miners who lost their jobs met in a large, well-lit hall to hear about their job prospects. The mine belongs to Alpha Natural Resources, which is—like most other big coal companies—in the midst of bankruptcy. In November, the company announced that the 220 miners employed at the Waynesburg, Pa. mine would lose their jobs.
The meeting had been organized by a pair of Emerald miners—Bob Wilson and Dave Hathaway—who were trying to find work and figure out what was next for them. They called their organization C.O.A.L.—Career Opportunities After Layoffs.
They said their main goal was to get help finding jobs and extending unemployment benefits for the Emerald miners, who share a dilemma with many of the more than 30,000 miners around the country who have lost their jobs in the past five years. They live in rural areas, where blue-collar jobs can be hard to come by, especially those with the kind of salaries they made at a coal mine.
Dave Serock, a former Emerald miner who now works for a private industry group, said the challenge was large.
Alpha Natural Resources declared bankruptcy in August 2015. Just a few years before, the company had borrowed billions of dollars to buy Massey Energy. It turned out they bought that company at around the peak of the coal market in 2011. Since then, the coal sector as a whole has lost 94 percent of its value according to a Bloomberg analysis.
Both Wilson said the mine’s closing didn’t come as a surprise. He could see it coming by the way they were told to mine coal. Instead of advancing through a coal seam, they were told to pull out belt, electrical and water lines from a section of coal they were mining in.
The end came a few weeks before Thanksgiving last year. They were called into a room at the beginning of their shift and told they’d be losing their jobs in January. At first, Hathaway said he was despondent. But then his friend Bob Wilson came to ask if he’d help him start the C.O.A.L. group.
Wilson got the idea from a man he knows from Alcoholics Anonymous. (Wilson is in recovery.) The man had been in the railroad industry and got laid off.
“He said they went through this with the railroad. They formed a committee like this for them to get them to extend unemployment benefits,” Wilson says. Hathaway and Wilson then went to the Greene County office of economic development and told the people there that they’d formed a committee called C.O.A.L.
Matesic and others gave Wilson and Hathaway resources and contacts, and set up meetings with local officials. Within a month, they were able to pull together the job opportunities meeting. Hathaway says one of the first steps was coming to terms with just how big a challenge the group now faces.
A number of factors have dragged down the coal industry. Increased competition from natural gas (thanks to the fracking boom), decreased demand and stricter environmental regulations have all hurt the industry.
Coal’s collapse has even been gaining attention in the presidential race. Donald Trump says he is going to bring coal mining back, though even some of coal’s biggest backers say the industry is never going to regain its recent peak levels.
There is federal money for retraining coal miners through the federal government’s POWER PLUS Program. But that money has to pass through agencies out to community colleges and non-profits that specialize in training. That can take months—maybe even a year—before miners get the help they need.
But Wilson says there are some measures that could help miners even more directly.
The two men applied to training programs for the local carpenters’ and electrical workers’ unions, driving an hour and a half to Pittsburgh several times to put in applications, conduct interviews, and take basic skills tests.
They’d heard about how some workers had their unemployment extended during the Recession, and thought the coal industry should get the same treatment. They asked their local elected officials to lobby the U.S. Department of Labor for an extension. But that request was denied.
For many of the Emerald miners, there’s no immediate or easy solution. Some have already had their unemployment insurance checks run out.
Hathaway and Wilson are now waiting to hear if they will be admitted into a union training program, which would pay them while they apprentice. In the meantime, they’re cutting grass to earn a little money. And Hathaway is waiting to hear if he’ll get recalled by Alpha to work at the company’s nearby Cumberland Mine. He’s number 25 on the waiting list.
He says if the mine calls him back, he’ll take it.