Life changes. Industries change. Adapt or die. Are we really supposed to feel bad for these people?
"It has been a hot and mean summer in Letcher County, with a rash of coal mine bankruptcies and layoffs even crueler than the ones that came before. From the barstools at the American Legion post to the parking lot of the unemployment office, there was little debate: The coal business around here is going under. The only question was what would keep everyone afloat.
These days, the answer has been: women. From 2010 to 2017, Letcher County saw a greater shift in the gender balance of its labor force than almost any other county in the United States."
"Coal mining has always been boom-and-bust, but it is hard to shake the feeling that this might be the last bust. Some men picked up and left at word of mining jobs elsewhere, some went to work as linemen or truck drivers, and others, figuring they were too old or physically broken to start over, just dropped out of the labor force. It was as if the very identity of a Letcher County man had been declared insolvent.
“I could always tell the man who worked in the mines,” said Debbie Baker, a cleaner in Whitesburg, the Letcher County seat. For one thing, “they had money.”
She recalled a family who lived comfortably where she grew up; the father worked underground and his sons followed, one by one. “The next would get old enough and get a wife and go working in the coal mines,” she said. “I don’t think any of the men did anything else.”
“When the mines left, they all ended up on drugs,” Ms. Baker added. “And their women went to work.”
Women in coal country always found paying work in greater numbers during the lean times, cleaning houses or making burgers, earning enough to get the family by until the mines picked up again. When that happened — and it always did — wives often returned home or cut back on hours because they could and because someone had to, child care being an elusive commodity. But just tiding the family over is not enough anymore.
There is little hope of finding work that could replace a miner’s income; women in Letcher County still on average make substantially lower salaries than men. But in a place stricken by chronic disease and opioid overdoses there is one area where workers are in constant demand: health care. Signing bonuses for nurses can reach into the five digits."
"A short drive from the community center up Coal Miner’s Highway, in a house his grandfather built, Mr. Rose considered the way Ms. Bowling went about things, and the way preferred by men like himself.
“We’re definitely a dying breed,” he said. He had been released from prison a few weeks earlier — drugs — and was now delivering merchandise for a hardware store. Getting back underground was the aim, but he wanted his sons to see how it was supposed to be: him hard at work and their mother at home with them.
This was getting harder to sustain, though. And fewer people seemed interested in holding onto it.
“The way of life is changing so bad,” Mr. Rose said. He grew quiet. “You’ll get overwhelmed if you think about it too hard.”