Does a much better job of explaining what I was trying to months ago when I said coal mining was the biggest white trash job in our economy. Exploitive, deadly, unsafe, unhealthy, and mostly exists in extremely rural, poor, uneducated areas. Execs typically get rich while convincing the worker bees to ignore safety regulations at their own expense/peril. Basically, the last job in the country we should be working hard to save.
[laughing]
Nope. Not even close.
*Exploitative (or
exploitive...whichever you prefer)? Find me another profession where people in a small town with nothing but a HS diploma can make $60K starting out, and can work themselves up to about $150K as a foreman in not much time. This ain't exactly indentured servitude. You work hard, you'll make a HELL of a living for your family.
*Deadly? 108.1 million man hours worked in 2016 in coal mines nationwide- 9 fatalities. Granted, that's 9 too many, but a far cry from the days when mine disasters would kill dozens of people at a time. And in 8 of those 9, the contributing cause of the fatality was the acts or behaviors of the victims themselves, not the external environment.
*Unsafe? Compared to slinging health insurance, sure. Compared to other factory or manual labor jobs, no.
*Unhealthy? No worse on your body than slowly grinding your joints to sand, 100 miles at a time.
*Exists in extremely rural, poor, uneducated areas? This is EXACTLY why it's important.
There are ****** coal operators who do things the wrong way, sure. But they are by far the minority these days, and in many cases have already gone under. To survive in this market, you have to be efficient, productive, and low-cost, and a ton of safety citations or lost workday injuries is not how you do it. At one point in history, safety and production did not go hand in hand, but that is not the case anymore.
So...how about I refrain from making uninformed statements about the current state of health insurance in America, because it's not what I do for a living, and you refrain from passing off the conclusions of some left-wing documentary you watched as though they accurately depict the mining industry in America today, and we're good. K?