When Donald Trump signed a bill to allow coal companies to pollute more streams and rivers, he brought in miners to pose in the background and generously offered to hand over the pen he used in the signing for two dozen miners to share. But while that bill will save coal companies millions in clean up costs, it won’t actually generate a single mining job. Because the reason that coal jobs have been in steep decline isn’t environmental laws, it’s a lack of demand for coal.
And while Trump pretends to help, Republicans are doing nothing to help real miners losing real benefits.
Almost 23,000 retired coal miners and their dependents on Wednesday received official notification that they could lose their health care benefits by April 30.
The benefits would have run out in 2016, but a short continuation neatly bridged them past election season. The fund for these benefits was endangered when major coal companies, which made a bet on an ever-expanding market right before fracking ate their lunch, filed for bankruptcy.
There’s a bill before Congress, the Miners Protection Act, which would help restore these benefits and protect the miners. But in addition to the rapid replacement of coal by natural gas, miners are facing the same problem that’s plagued other manufacturing sectors.
… new technologies allow coal companies to extract the mineral with far fewer employees than the process once required. This means the number of active miners paying into the union pension fund is minuscule compared to the number of retirees and their dependents collecting benefits from it.
In fact, senators estimate the number of active miners paying into the pension fund to be only 10,000, while there are 120,000 retirees drawing from it.
The pension system for miners, like that in many other industries, was configured around the idea that there would always be another generation to carry the previous generation through. But that’s no longer true in mining.
Coal mining is dying. Donald Trump may not know it, and Republicans in general are too busy using miners as sympathetic props to admit it, but mining will continue to decline. Coal mining is like whaling; it was once a storied and important industry, but now it is going away. Pretending that’s not happening, and failing to take actions to help those caught at the tail end of a dying industry, is only going to cause more pain.