Why do coal miners want to continue working such a horrible, dirty job?

[X_Digger]

77. I'm from Coal Country, and I picketed for the UMWA before I could walk. Have a seat.

The first thing you have to understand that absolutely blows folks away is that there is no land. Scratch that- there is no flat land. Roads are literally blasted out of the side of a mountain that's damned near vertical. Anything approaching flat land is right next to the creek or river, and is in the flood plain. Every 20, 50, or 75 years, a storm washes most of the houses away down there next to the creek/river.

http://bit.ly/2bK94r2 -- Click on this link- this is a satellite view of Grundy. Zoom in, and take a street view tour.

In order for there to be some other industry to replace coal, you'd have to have some kind of flat land. A factory? (As if someone's building decent factories in the US these days..) Requires a HUGE amount of flat land, of which there is almost none. The closest some come is turning smaller buildings into schools.

My home town of Grundy has opened a law school (you'll recall the Appalachian Law School shooting a few years ago), and a pharmacy school. They tried to also open a call center, but even minimum wage couldn't compete with offshore call centers.

They know coal is dying, but with literally NOTHING else as an alternative, what do you expect them to do? Who's going to pay to retrain them, and while they're being retrained, who's going to feed their families? Once retrained, who's going to pay to move them to somewhere they can use those shiny new skills? I mean shit, I could retrain a decently motivated person to build web apps, but fuck if there's a single job for that in Grundy. Might be five in the whole county.

It's a shitty situation, but it's a damned sight better than starving.