Saving Coal Jobs is a Fairy Tale
One of the sad truths about Kentucky, my adopted home state, is that there are a lot of good people here who are poorly educated. There are a lot of historic reasons for that, but two key parts of the history are that: Coal mine owners have been exploiting the poorest of the poor here for generations. This fact is not in dispute. Hell, they didn't even pay people in actual dollars until the 1950s. Prior to that you were paid in company "scrip" that was only good at the company store. There's a song about that. For the first 150 years of coal production (1820-1970), state, local, and federal governments sided with mine owners over miners roughly 100% of the time when it came to labor disputes, working conditions etc. (today it's down to about 85%). Take a 1932 Kentucky law that forbid the conversion of scrip into actual cash as an example; I wonder whose idea that was? Scrip is just one obvious and particularly egregious example. Dangerous working condition...