By: Connor D. Hicks
“If you ain’t minin’ for the company boy there ain’t much in this town
We could’ve made somethin’ of ourselves out there if we’d listened to the folks that knew
that coal is gonna bury you.”[i]
As coal production continues to decline, no region has been impacted more than Central Appalachia.[ii] In Central Appalachia, coal industry employment fell 40 percent from 2005 to 2015.[iii] As a result, Kentucky and West Virginia are tasked with finding sustainable employment for laid-off miners who possess a niche skillset and often a limited education.
Across the region, a stable movement to repurpose unemployed coal miners is underway.[iv] Richwood Scientific teaches unemployed coal miners computer skills necessary to develop apps and websites.[v] The program’s founder relocated from Malibu, California to Richwood, West Virginia, one of many towns devastated by historic flooding in 2016.[vi] He immediately found the miners’ work ethics coupled with their mathematical and technological skills translated well to computer coding.[vii] Similar programs exist in Clendenin, West Virginia and Pikeville, Kentucky.[viii]
In an industry where nearly three percent of workers have a college degree, it is difficult to find a way to repurpose skillsets for other industries.[ix] “Proponents of these [programs] often speak of the acquisition of tech skills not just as a path to economic uplift but a symbolic transformation … to face the 21st century.”[x] While West Virginia once boasted a thriving economy fueled by coal, the industry continues to flee the Mountain State.[xi] Even as jobs leave, for many it remains the “only way that many West Virginians can earn a decent middle-class wage.”[xii] Nine out of ten men in Appalachia do not have a college degree, but mining presents a possibility for a $60,000 salary out of high school.[xiii]Thus, it may require a coordinated effort to encourage miners to leave the dying coal industry in the past in favor of the sprawling technology sector.
In 2018, the technology industry added 261,000 new jobs and had a $1.82 billion economic impact.[xiv] While this displays the exponential potential for job growth in West Virginia, it will require help from the state. West Virginia would need to invest in the necessary infrastructure to support modern internet, as current internet capabilities are among the worst in the country.[xv]
Additionally, American industrialization has a long history of taking advantage of West Virginians, dating back to the coal towns and company scrip established by out-of-state charlatans in the late nineteenth-century to exploit the state’s resources and workers.[xvi] Convincing miners this new sector has good intentions has already proved challenging, best evidenced by a recent class action filed in Raleigh County, West Virginia.[xvii] The non-profit Mined Mines was invited into the state by Sen. Joe Manchin with a $1.7 million grant.[xviii] Former miners were promised a job upon completing the program, and some risked their livelihood to participate.[xix] When Mined Mines failed to deliver promised results and the jobs never came, sixty former participants in the program filed suit for alleged fraudulent behavior.[xx]
The future employment of thousands who have relied upon coal for a living remains uncertain, but computer programming presents a path to sustainability for Appalachians. Working to transition former miners into sustainable career paths “is likely to be a much more effective strategy than attempting to revive the coal industry with policy.”[xxi]Whether it is through tech or alternative industries, Appalachian states have a duty to ensure residents are not buried in the plot alongside the dying coal industry.[xxii]
[i] Tyler Childers, Coal, on Bottles and Bibles (Tyler Childers 2011); see also, Rich Copley, Tyler Childers’ music has grown up with him, Lexgo! (Mar. 23, 2014), https://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/music-news-reviews/article44478480.html (Childers is a Lawrence County, Kentucky native and son of a coal miner. He currently resides in West Virginia and frequently sings about the struggles of life in coal country).
[ii] Eric Bowen, PhD, et al., An Overview of the Coal Economy of Appalachia 10 (2018) (According to the report, “Central Appalachia” includes almost the entirety of Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, as well as several counties in Tennessee and Virginia).
[iii] Id. at 18.
[iv] Weijia Jiang, Out-of-work coal miners find new work in computer industry, CBS News (Nov. 18, 2017), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/out-of-work-coal-miners-find-new-work-in-computer-industry/.
[v] Pandora Affeman, West Virginia’s Next Big Industry: Brain Power, The Observer (May 15, 2015), https://wearetheobserver.com/west-virginias-next-big-industry-brain-power/; see generally Richwood Scientific, https://richwoodscientific.com/#ourMission (last visited Feb. 16, 2020).
[vi] Id.; Normalcy still a long way off in flood-ravaged Richwood, MetroNews (June 28, 2016), http://wvmetronews.com/2016/06/28/normalcy-still-a-long-way-off-in-flood-ravaged-richwood/ (“The historic flooding didn’t claim any lives in Richwood, but residents will tell you it claimed peace of mind, security, normalcy, and nearly everything else.”).
[vii] Affeman, supra note 5.
[viii] Erica Peterson, From Coal to Code: A New Path for Laid-Off Miners in Kentucky, NPR (May 6, 2016), https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/05/06/477033781/from-coal-to-code-a-new-path-for-laid-off-miners-in-kentucky (“[Rocky] Justice is one of the owners of Bit Source, a year-old tech startup in Pikeville, Ky … after lots of research, he and his business partner settled on coding, with the aim of tapping the region’s workforce of laid-off coal miners and teaching them a new skill”); Jiang, supra note 4.
[ix] Dep’t of Health and Human Res., National Survey of the Mining Population 61 (2012), https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/userfiles/works/pdfs/2012-152.pdf.
[x] Elizabeth Catte, In Appalachia, Coding Bootcamps That Aim To Retrain Coal Miners Increasingly Show Themselves To Be ‘New Collar’ Grifters, Belt Magazine (Jan. 11, 2018), https://beltmag.com/appalachia-coding-bootcamps/.
[xi] Gwynn Guilford, The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal, Quartz(Dec. 30, 2017), https://qz.com/1167671/the-100-year-capitalist-experiment-that-keeps-appalachia-poor-sick-and-stuck-on-coal/ (“Nearly 100 years ago, Henry Hatfield, who became the governor of West Virginia in 1913, predicted this contemporary dilemma.”).
[xii] Id.
[xiii] Devin Dwyer, Craving Coal Dust Like ‘Nicotine’: Why Miners Love the Work, ABC News (Apr. 7, 2010), https://abcnews.go.com/US/Mine/west-virginia-coal-miners-allure-dangerous-profession/story?id=10305839.
[xiv] Cyberstates, https://www.cyberstates.org/ (last visited Feb. 16, 2020).
[xv] Eric Eyre, WV Internet providers targeted over slow speeds, Charleston Gazette-Mail (Jan. 17, 2016)https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/wv-internet-providers-targeted-over-slow-speeds/article_b208dce1-0e24-5bab-bb60-b5b937b19356.html; Akamai, Akamai’s State of the Internet 3 (2017), https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-executive-summary.pdf.
[xvi] See generally Company Towns in the U.S., VCU Libraries, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/programs/housing/company-towns-1890s-to-1935/ (last visited Feb. 16, 2020) (analysis of oppressive nature of coal company towns and the use of company ‘scrip’ in Virginia and West Virginia); see also William R. Wishart, Extraction, Ecology, Exploitation, and Oppression: The Political Economy of Coal in Appalachia (2007) (unpublished thesis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville) (on file with University of Tennessee).
[xvii] See Catte, supra note 10;
[xviii] Catte, supra note 10; Campbell Robertson, They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud, New York Times (May 12, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virginia-coding.html.
[xix] Robertson, supra note 19.
[xx] Id. (Despite the lawsuit, “Mined Minds has continued operating, holding new classes in Logan, another hard-luck coal town in West Virginia”).
[xxi] Samantha Gross, Why there’s no bringing coal back, The Brookings Institution (Jan. 16, 2019), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpolicy/2019/01/16/why-theres-no-bringing-coal-back/ (Gross also states, “any successful policy to revive the industry will be working against economic headwinds, and thus difficult to maintain over the long term”).
[xxii] See Diane Cardwell, What’s Up in Coal Country: Alternative Energy Jobs, New York Times (Sept. 30, 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/30/business/energy-environment/coal-alternative-energy-jobs.html (proposing repurposing miners to alternative energy sources); see also Coalfield Development, https://coalfield-development.org/(last visited Feb. 16, 2020) (support program for local business in Wayne, West Virginia); see also Solar Hollar, https://www.solarholler.com/our-work (last visited Feb. 17, 2020) (solar job training and apprenticeship program in West Virginia); see also Appalachian Headwaters, https://appheadwaters.org/ (nonprofit focusing on restoration of forests, clean streams, and a network of sustainable beekeeping in Lewisburg, West Virginia); see also Charles Young, WV Senate passes bill to encourage solar energy, WV News (Feb. 14, 2020), https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/wv-senate-passes-bill-to-encourage-solar-energy/article_aaf22772-52f1-54a4-9c3a-0ba59d2cfd98.html (“What this does is it allows our Commerce department to go out and recruit tech companies that require renewable energies before they will move to the state,” said West Virginia Industry and Mining Chair Randy Smith after the West Virginia Senate unanimously passed Senate Bill 583 to develop solar energy in the state).