America’s coal job, ignored by politicians

A COUPLE months ago, Donald Trump was cheering a new coal mine in Pennsylvania that will put 70 people to work – good news for a president whose pledge to revive the industry helped get him elected. But a bigger group of coal workers has already suffered sweeping job cuts, and it’s bracing for more.

Coal-fired power plants employ more people than mines, and they’re shutting down all over the country. Cheap natural gas, the rise of renewables backed by tax credits, and subsidies for nuclear energy will likely combine to keep the trend going -and leave more people like Lynnette Faje out of work.

Faje had spent more than a quarter century at an Illinoisbased power company that’s owned today by NRG Energy Inc.

She had survived two buyouts and had spent her final three years at the company as a laborer on the plant floor after her office position was cut. She found out her US$23.50 (RM106) -an-hour job was being eliminated entirely while taking minutes one day at a local union meeting.

“Pretty much everything I’ve worked for my whole life is pretty much gone,’’ Faje, 51, said. She voted for Trump, and wants to go back to work at a coal plant, but sees little chance of that happening. Contractors have been hired to do her old job now and she’s found work on the overnight shift at a candy factory, earning 28 per cent less an hour than she did at NRG to watch Baby Ruth bars roll by on the conveyor belt.

Coal-fired plants employed 86,035 people in the US last year. That may not seem like a huge amount in a country of some 150 million workers but it’s 16 per cent more than the number employed at mines, according to the US government. It’s also a younger and more diverse work force, with women making up more than a third of it, and ethnic minorities about a quarter.

Curiously, they haven’t gotten nearly as much attention as the miners – even though their numbers are shrinking fast. And coal comebacks like the one Trump hailed in Pennsylvania won’t help them. Corsa Coal’s venture there is digging up metallurgical coal, which is used in steelmaking and often exported.