Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
False equivalence.
Nope. You keep wanting to act like industrialization was like the worst thing to happen to labour while ignoring what conditions were actually like before that.
I’m as pro-renewable, green energy as anyone, but to totally dismiss the concerns of coal workers who are being kicked to the curb with no consideration as nothing but “greed” is incredibly classist and tells me you’ve never lived in or around a coal town. My brother dug coal for 12 years. He hated it. His family hated it. His coworkers mostly hated it. But it was work in a town where there wasn’t much else and it paid the bills and kept his kids fed a little better than working at the Walmart 2 towns over would have. Coal miners aren’t getting rich. Jesus Christ, what an absurd take.
The onus should be on the mining companies to take care of transitioning their workers to new fields and industries, not on the workers to “just figure it out” after the company that employs a third of their town packs it in. On top of that, of course we also desperately need expanded social aid programs for those who fall through the cracks, but we should be squeezing the companies first and foremost to take care of the workers they exploit.
The miners literally do not want that, they wish to remain coal miners.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), told Newsweek on Wednesday that he could not support President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan with its current goal of achieving 80 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035....
Biden’s plan states that it will create “250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines” that offer the choice of union membership. However, Roberts fears these workers will ultimately be left behind during the switch to renewable energy. With roughly 80 percent of solar panels being manufactured in China, Roberts said that blue-collar clean-energy positions may not make their way to states like West Virginia, forcing workers to either leave or join a new sector.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
No, you are the one ignoring the human cost. You are the one complaining about the poor coal miners losing their jobs and not looking at what coal mining or it's replacement with more green energy actually does to society at large. "Society at large" being, you know, humans. Lots of them. You wanna spin a fantasy of the poor pre-industrial artisan workers cruelly losing their livelihoods while ignoring what that actually does for everyone. Automation isn't some random bit of cruelty inflicted upon people by maniacal evil bosses. It's massive gains in efficiency and production and lowering of costs. That's why it's always been done.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I’m as pro-renewable, green energy as anyone, but to totally dismiss the concerns of coal workers who are being kicked to the curb with no consideration as nothing but “greed” is incredibly classist and tells me you’ve never lived in or around a coal town. My brother dug coal for 12 years. He hated it. His family hated it. His coworkers mostly hated it. But it was work in a town where there wasn’t much else and it paid the bills and kept his kids fed a little better than working at the Walmart 2 towns over would have. Coal miners aren’t getting rich. Jesus Christ, what an absurd take.
The onus should be on the mining companies to take care of transitioning their workers to new fields and industries, not on the workers to “just figure it out” after the company that employs a third of their town packs it in. On top of that, of course we also desperately need expanded social aid programs for those who fall through the cracks, but we should be squeezing the companies first and foremost to take care of the workers they exploit.
The miners literally do not want that, they wish to remain coal miners.
Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), told Newsweek on Wednesday that he could not support President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan with its current goal of achieving 80 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030 and 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035....
Biden’s plan states that it will create “250,000 jobs plugging abandoned oil and natural gas wells and reclaiming abandoned coal, hardrock, and uranium mines” that offer the choice of union membership. However, Roberts fears these workers will ultimately be left behind during the switch to renewable energy. With roughly 80 percent of solar panels being manufactured in China, Roberts said that blue-collar clean-energy positions may not make their way to states like West Virginia, forcing workers to either leave or join a new sector.
The Democratic Candidate before Biden also had a plan to try to turn Coal regions into something else, and we can see what obviously happened there.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
You are right, it's not like there weren't generations spent making sure that coal mining (like a lot of factory jobs in other places) were seen as THE jobs, with really good pay and attendant social status in areas. When you start factoring in their neighbors livestyles, especially in the last couple decades with much lower incomes, of COURSE they are going to take the selfish route out. Most people would.
To dismiss it as personal greed is such a disconnected trainwreck of an idea I'm not even going to engage it further.
It doesn't matter why they don't want to stop being coal miners. That's not the argument at hand. The point is that we are all better off if people stop mining and using coal as much as possible. And that coal miners getting to keep their jobs is not some fucking great victory for labour rights.
Until you have a better solution for them, saying “Just stop being a coal miner” is both ignorant to the region’s history with regards to being a miner (which is important to respect if you don’t want the people you would be trying to convince to dismiss you out of hand) and is asking them to go broke and die in a ditch without having a program in place to not only re-educate them, but find them the better paying job afterwards and cover their living expenses during said education.
If you aren’t willing to do those things at the minimum, then don’t gripe about those people making the only living they can afford to
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Hail Hydra
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Until you have a better solution for them, saying “Just stop being a coal miner” is both ignorant to the region’s history with regards to being a miner (which is important to respect if you don’t want the people you would be trying to convince to dismiss you out of hand) and is asking them to go broke and die in a ditch without having a program in place to not only re-educate them, but find them the better paying job afterwards and cover their living expenses during said education.
If you aren’t willing to do those things at the minimum, then don’t gripe about those people making the only living they can afford to
there was like 30 billion pledged for infrastructure changes, support, education and research investment training, and so on.
Don't post one line snark, even if you edit it into something else later, after everyone has seen the original post and gotten good and mad about it the way you wanted.
Yeah I mean I 100% support coal miners when it comes to them wanting coal companies to get fucked wrt fucking them over. Because fuck coal companies and not just because of the environmental damage they cause, they fucking suck in general.
At the same time I 100% don't give a fuck about coal miners when they reject support for them to move into other jobs and then vote for an asshole that very clearly never gave a shit about them and that, even if he did, was very obviously too incompetent to do anything at all to help them and the industry they're in that is rightly dying.
Until you have a better solution for them, saying “Just stop being a coal miner” is both ignorant to the region’s history with regards to being a miner (which is important to respect if you don’t want the people you would be trying to convince to dismiss you out of hand) and is asking them to go broke and die in a ditch without having a program in place to not only re-educate them, but find them the better paying job afterwardsand cover their living expenses during said education.
If you aren’t willing to do those things at the minimum, then don’t gripe about those people making the only living they can afford to
And not only that with the bolded, their homes also don’t have the infrastructure to support these new jobs! You can train people in new skills all you want, but if there arent any opportunities to do that work at a living wage they can’t use any of it to provide for themselves!
There’s a reason just about every article you read about the economic state of West Virginia includes the notion that folks feel the only chance for subsequent generations born there is to escape the damn state. There aren’t sufficient jobs there outside the mines that page a living wage for their residents.
So as much as it feels good for folks to be angry at individual coal miners who are ruining the planet with their coal jobs, it won’t do anything to actually end the system that keeps all this misery going. You have to build up something new that lets folks live and work with dignity and dismantle the old Immiseration Engine.
If you want people to stop clinging to coal mining for dear life, give them a stable economy where they’ll be safe in finally letting go of the cliff face
Lanz on
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Until you have a better solution for them, saying “Just stop being a coal miner” is both ignorant to the region’s history with regards to being a miner (which is important to respect if you don’t want the people you would be trying to convince to dismiss you out of hand) and is asking them to go broke and die in a ditch without having a program in place to not only re-educate them, but find them the better paying job afterwardsand cover their living expenses during said education.
If you aren’t willing to do those things at the minimum, then don’t gripe about those people making the only living they can afford to
And not only that with the bolded, their homes also don’t have the infrastructure to support these new jobs! You can train people in new skills all you want, but if there arent any opportunities to do that work at a living wage they can’t use any of it to provide for themselves!
There’s a reason just about every article you read about the economic state of West Virginia includes the notion that folks feel the only chance for subsequent generations born there to have a future is to escape the damn state. There aren’t sufficient jobs there outside of the mines that page a living wage for their residents.
So as much as it feels good for folks to be angry at individual coal miners who are ruining the planet with their coal jobs, it won’t do anything to actually end the system that keeps all this misery going. You have to build up something new that lets folks live and work with dignity and dismantle the old Immiseration Engine.
If you want people to stop clinging to coal mining for dear life, give them a stable economy where they’ll be safe in finally letting go of the cliff face
Well, they voted against that. Which is what we're talking about.
I'm just curious if anyone actually knows and has spoken to anyone who is working - now or in the past half decade - as a coal miner face to face or if they are basing their assumptions on coal miners on diner safari stories.
At present, the remaining coal miners are heavy equipment operators (and heavy equipment support personnel). The equipment they work with is largely specialized for their industry, but the skills needed to operate mining and support equipment as well as maintaining that equipment is highly portable from one industry to another. While coal mining is generally the steadiest and best paying working in the region for heavy equipment operators, skilled heavy equipment operators aren't lacking for work anywhere in the US.
The idea that these workers are either carrying their pickaxes to haul their 16 tons out each morning or their twelve kids are going to starve in the Appalachian shotgun shacks is completely detached from the reality of the modern coal industry. Most coal miners left are decidedly upper middle class blue collar workers like the UAW auto workers here in SE Michigan.
Yes, there are some lower paid positions in the industry as well that aren't in as high demand as equipment operators and mechanics and such but even in coal country you can make $12 / hour working at McDonalds being a warm body walking in the door.
I'm just curious if anyone actually knows and has spoken to anyone who is working - now or in the past half decade - as a coal miner face to face or if they are basing their assumptions on coal miners on diner safari stories.
At present, the remaining coal miners are heavy equipment operators (and heavy equipment support personnel). The equipment they work with is largely specialized for their industry, but the skills needed to operate mining and support equipment as well as maintaining that equipment is highly portable from one industry to another. While coal mining is generally the steadiest and best paying working in the region for heavy equipment operators, skilled heavy equipment operators aren't lacking for work anywhere in the US.
The idea that these workers are either carrying their pickaxes to haul their 16 tons out each morning or their twelve kids are going to starve in the Appalachian shotgun shacks is completely detached from the reality of the modern coal industry. Most coal miners left are decidedly upper middle class blue collar workers like the UAW auto workers here in SE Michigan.
Yes, there are some lower paid positions in the industry as well that aren't in as high demand as equipment operators and mechanics and such but even in coal country you can make $12 / hour working at McDonalds being a warm body walking in the door.
I’m as pro-renewable, green energy as anyone, but to totally dismiss the concerns of coal workers who are being kicked to the curb with no consideration as nothing but “greed” is incredibly classist and tells me you’ve never lived in or around a coal town. My brother dug coal for 12 years. He hated it. His family hated it. His coworkers mostly hated it. But it was work in a town where there wasn’t much else and it paid the bills and kept his kids fed a little better than working at the Walmart 2 towns over would have. Coal miners aren’t getting rich. Jesus Christ, what an absurd take.
The onus should be on the mining companies to take care of transitioning their workers to new fields and industries, not on the workers to “just figure it out” after the company that employs a third of their town packs it in. On top of that, of course we also desperately need expanded social aid programs for those who fall through the cracks, but we should be squeezing the companies first and foremost to take care of the workers they exploit.
That’s dudes in a fuckin’ mine shoveling shit onto conveyors to move it out of the mine. That’s folks riding a tiny ass elevator to get deep into the mines.
So yeah. The reality of coal mining is still folks going down into dank ass tunnels deep below the earth to dredge up shit
These aren’t your fuckin’ NYT “poll some diners in trump country.” This is actual investigative journalism where the reporters are actually doing their due diligence, and it’s be nice if people stopped relying on lazy catch alls that allow them to dismiss this kind of reporting when it doesn’t fit with their preconceived image of the folks they’re denigrating as trumpist rubes.
So now we're at the point of "vote Blue no matter who, but also fuck 'em for voting for Joe Manchin?"
I'm not comfortable with people writing off entire electorates as deserving of whatever happens to them because of who got elected there regardless of party, but it's especially galling when it's an ostensibly Democratic politician who I am told we absolutely need to be in office.
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
edited May 2022
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Metzger Meister on
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jmcdonaldI voted, did you?DC(ish)Registered Userregular
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
seriously? get fucked. i grew up food, housing and utility poor. who knew if it was gas or electric this month that was going to be off. Graduated high school at 6 foot 135 pounds because i was accustomed to eating being an option.
Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean you're right, or they have no context.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
You are right, it's not like there weren't generations spent making sure that coal mining (like a lot of factory jobs in other places) were seen as THE jobs, with really good pay and attendant social status in areas. When you start factoring in their neighbors livestyles, especially in the last couple decades with much lower incomes, of COURSE they are going to take the selfish route out. Most people would.
To dismiss it as personal greed is such a disconnected trainwreck of an idea I'm not even going to engage it further.
The impetus for "...making sure coal mining were seen as THE jobs..." was from the rich coal mine owners, not from the lower middle class coal miners. What you're doing is victim blaming..
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
And you can’t fix wide spread systemic issues with individualized guilt; you have to actually tackle it with systemic-minded solutions!
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
False equivalence.
Nope. You keep wanting to act like industrialization was like the worst thing to happen to labour while ignoring what conditions were actually like before that.
Neither Hacksaw nor Lanz nor anyone else in this thread has advocated for a return to a pre-industrialization society, so please knock off this strawman nonsense. If people choose to celebrate workers rising up and destroying the machines that displaced them, it's not that we want to return to the stone age, it's that we are celebrating a worker uprising against an oppressive owner class that exists only to exploit then discard the workers.
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
seriously? get fucked. i grew up food, housing and utility poor. who knew if it was gas or electric this month that was going to be off. Graduated high school at 6 foot 135 pounds because i was accustomed to eating being an option.
Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean you're right, or they have no context.
Cool beans man, me too, I only make about $197 a month on state disability so if you really wanna bump chests over who had the worse upbringing financially we can definitely do that, but in the meantime I would like an answer as to why ostensibly democratic voters have such a low opinion of the working class other than meaningless fuckin horseshit in the face of the mercilessly grinding greed of the capitalists that are actually fuckin forcing these miners down the pit.
Fuck that. That's a goddamn betrayal. That's victim blaming. White-collar liberals love to point at the poor and say "see these ignorant rubes are the problem" while the politicians THEY VOTED FOR continue to cut checks to oil companies and extract wealth and resources from the global south.
Y'all ain't enlightened, you just get a little more sun up there in your fuckin ivory tower than the proles do down here on the ground.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
Hell, go back and watch the Vice piece; 950 job applicants for a 10-slot opening at one of those tech start ups. Like the guys there said, you can see the problem right there: people are tethered to coal because it’s the foundation of their economy, and when it goes it takes the entire region it supported down with it. These regions need new foundations for their economies, and pretending it’s the individual miners’ faults isn’t going to get that shit done
Lanz on
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
And yet, you seem to be one of the people on the boards most furiously dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Fascinating.
Edit: must've been nice, being in a solid union family, good benefits and all. My mom raised four teenage boys in 30k a year, with my dad constantly in and out of the hospital. You ever had sleep for dinner, friend?
Edit 2: also, you know what? Yes, I do thi k that people who've never experienced poverty, and I mean POVERTY, should get to talk about what decisions coal miners make to feed their families. Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
What's wrong with a gig at McDonalds?
It's a solid secure job with benefits and opportunity for advancement. If the starting pay at McDonalds is comparable to the backbreaking miserable body and lung destroying jobs in the mines I don't see why you would denigrate working there or (as someone did earlier) in Walmart / retail as below them or not a valid option. Besides places paying $12 for McDonalds are typically going to have openings - even in rural Appalachia - that pay $15-18 for the skills a coal worker has.
Manufacturing and resource extraction generally suck and that's kind of the nature of the job. Most people who do those jobs hate it and its not just coal mining so telling me someone in a plant or mine hates what they are doing is no surprise.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
I mean I’ll be blunt here Zag, honestly at times it feels like you and others talk about folks less like they’re rational human beings, with complex reasons for their behavior that are fundamentally influenced by their living conditions, and something more akin to frustrating right wing philosophical zombies.
A $12 per hour wage is not really a decent livable wage. You can't really provide for a family on that. It's probably not going to pull people away from coal mining.
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
And yet, you seem to be one of the people on the boards most furiously dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Fascinating.
Edit: must've been nice, being in a solid union family, good benefits and all. My mom raised four teenage boys in 30k a year, with my dad constantly in and out of the hospital. You ever had sleep for dinner, friend?
Edit 2: also, you know what? Yes, I do thi k that people who've never experienced poverty, and I mean POVERTY, should get to talk about what decisions coal miners make to feed their families. Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
Yes friend, I have.
And I'm not going to get into a hard times olympics dick measuring contest so all I'm going to say is you don't know me so stop presuming you do.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
What's wrong with a gig at McDonalds?
It's a solid secure job with benefits and opportunity for advancement. If the starting pay at McDonalds is comparable to the backbreaking miserable body and lung destroying jobs in the mines I don't see why you would denigrate working there or (as someone did earlier) in Walmart / retail as below them or not a valid option. Besides places paying $12 for McDonalds are typically going to have openings - even in rural Appalachia - that pay $15-18 for the skills a coal worker has.
Manufacturing and resource extraction generally suck and that's kind of the nature of the job. Most people who do those jobs hate it and its not just coal mining so telling me someone in a plant or mine hates what they are doing is no surprise.
It doesn’t pay enough to live on. It fails the primary purpose of having a job.
It’s categorically none of the things you’ve said, and fast food worker is not a career known for its advancement
And again, it ignores the foundational economy in these places is Coal Mining. You cannot ignore this, because as people keep pointing out, the coal mines provide the economic basis that supports local businesses from hardware stores to fast food franchises etc. and when that collapses, there’s no more money coming in to keep those attendant businesses going; the economic source dries up, there’s no more money to spread into the rest of the economy to keep it going. There’s no more fuel, no more blood, the engine seizes up and the economic body dies.
You’re talking like a Republican talking head from the 90s and aughts at this point.
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
And yet, you seem to be one of the people on the boards most furiously dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Fascinating.
Edit: must've been nice, being in a solid union family, good benefits and all. My mom raised four teenage boys in 30k a year, with my dad constantly in and out of the hospital. You ever had sleep for dinner, friend?
Edit 2: also, you know what? Yes, I do thi k that people who've never experienced poverty, and I mean POVERTY, should get to talk about what decisions coal miners make to feed their families. Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
Yes friend, I have.
And I'm not going to get into a hard times olympics dick measuring contest so all I'm going to say is you don't know me so stop presuming you do.
I know you plenty, pard. You're not some big mystery. You're a liberal in a cozy profession who wants to maintain the status quo because they benefit from it. It's not like it's a difficult puzzle to solve. The fact that you, apparently, have struggled at some point in your life, and then look at other people struggling and just throw your hands up and say "well, they chose to be poor and exploited, there's just nothing we can do about it" tells me everything I need to know about you.
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
What's wrong with a gig at McDonalds?
It's a solid secure job with benefits and opportunity for advancement. If the starting pay at McDonalds is comparable to the backbreaking miserable body and lung destroying jobs in the mines I don't see why you would denigrate working there or (as someone did earlier) in Walmart / retail as below them or not a valid option. Besides places paying $12 for McDonalds are typically going to have openings - even in rural Appalachia - that pay $15-18 for the skills a coal worker has.
Manufacturing and resource extraction generally suck and that's kind of the nature of the job. Most people who do those jobs hate it and its not just coal mining so telling me someone in a plant or mine hates what they are doing is no surprise.
I did. Because that job at Walmart isn’t going to pay anywhere near enough to take care of a family with kids. It’s not that the work is beneath them, it’s that it might as well be unemployment compared to a livable (if not thriving) wage. When you compare it to the $25+ an hour they’re getting working in coal, yeah, it’s insulting to tell someone they should just halve their income that was only just barely enough to begin with.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
What's wrong with a gig at McDonalds?
It's a solid secure job with benefits and opportunity for advancement. If the starting pay at McDonalds is comparable to the backbreaking miserable body and lung destroying jobs in the mines I don't see why you would denigrate working there or (as someone did earlier) in Walmart / retail as below them or not a valid option. Besides places paying $12 for McDonalds are typically going to have openings - even in rural Appalachia - that pay $15-18 for the skills a coal worker has.
Manufacturing and resource extraction generally suck and that's kind of the nature of the job. Most people who do those jobs hate it and its not just coal mining so telling me someone in a plant or mine hates what they are doing is no surprise.
I did. Because that job at Walmart isn’t going to pay anywhere near enough to take care of a family with kids. It’s not that the work is beneath them, it’s that it might as well be unemployment compared to a livable (if not thriving) wage. When you compare it to the $25+ an hour they’re getting working in coal, yeah, it’s insulting to tell someone they should just halve their income that was only just barely enough to begin with.
And let's compare the benefits packages of even salaried McDonald's employees to a coal miner's benefits, especially if they're union.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
I mean I’ll be blunt here Zag, honestly at times it feels like you and others talk about folks less like they’re rational human beings, with complex reasons for their behavior that are fundamentally influenced by their living conditions, and something more akin to frustrating right wing philosophical zombies.
Especially on the subject of coal miners.
You mean the p-zombies that are are my friends and neighbors who I frequently have multi-hour long conversations with about all kinds of topics?
One where the - my words - novelty of talking to some big city liberal often spurs some pretty deep and interesting / introspective conversations? Yes, clearly I think they are subhuman autonomations who are lost to AM radio and Fox News propoganda.
People are complicated and each of them is unique and has unique motivations.
But if you want to talk about a narrow topic - labor and coal mining / miners in Appalachia - that I have personal knowledge both of them individually and the region people are making blanket theoretical statements about, I'm going to share my own experiences and what I've seen and heard with my own eyes and ears and point out where you're trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.
The conversations are the same as talking to UAW workers in SE Michigan in 2008. And a good part of it is people don't want to be change even if the industry is dying around them and just want to be mad about it and hope someone fixes it instead of trying to change. The auto workers were lucky enough their industry is vital and just needed life support and not one that is basically already dead and just twitching. But the people remaining in the industry do have some options beyond living in a shack and starving to death, despite many of them frequently and feverently voting for people who would have them do just that.
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
You literally just described everyone with a job.
Yeah, it's almost like capitalism has made slaves of all of us and is a system based on extortion and the threat of slow death by starvation. But to pretend that that system affects everyone equally is also pretty silly. A hedge fund manager can afford to not work for a while. A minimum wage worker can't miss a single day. If you can afford the luxury of like, taking a few weeks off to look for a new job, that puts you in a category above millions of other people.
I don’t know how someone pays any actual attention to reporting in these issues and walks away with “stubborn miners just wanna mine coal, because bad culture reasons”
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
I mean I’ll be blunt here Zag, honestly at times it feels like you and others talk about folks less like they’re rational human beings, with complex reasons for their behavior that are fundamentally influenced by their living conditions, and something more akin to frustrating right wing philosophical zombies.
Especially on the subject of coal miners.
You mean the p-zombies that are are my friends and neighbors who I frequently have multi-hour long conversations with about all kinds of topics?
One where the - my words - novelty of talking to some big city liberal often spurs some pretty deep and interesting / introspective conversations? Yes, clearly I think they are subhuman autonomations who are lost to AM radio and Fox News propoganda.
People are complicated and each of them is unique and has unique motivations.
But if you want to talk about a narrow topic - labor and coal mining / miners in Appalachia - that I have personal knowledge both of them individually and the region people are making blanket theoretical statements about, I'm going to share my own experiences and what I've seen and heard with my own eyes and ears and point out where you're trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.
The conversations are the same as talking to UAW workers in SE Michigan in 2008. And a good part of it is people don't want to be change even if the industry is dying around them and just want to be mad about it and hope someone fixes it instead of trying to change. The auto workers were lucky enough their industry is vital and just needed life support and not one that is basically already dead and just twitching. But the people remaining in the industry do have some options beyond living in a shack and starving to death, despite many of them frequently and feverently voting for people who would have them do just that.
Then it seems like maybe you’re not really listening to them if you keep making the arguments you are.
Like, the basis for this entire argument you’re making is “don’t listen to reporting, don’t listen to what these folk are saying when interviewed by journalistic professionals, I have the real inside track to the mind and status of the Appalachian coal miner. I know them, personally, you see! And they don’t actually want change, they just want conservatism and coal!”
And like there’s the fun part: I have no means of disproving that you know them, that you have had these conservasations. But yet at the same time, I present article after article, news report after news report, that runs counter to your claims and you, the person who has these connections never bridges the clear gap between the portrayals. You don’t even engage with the sourced reports outside of a general hand wave dismissal of NYT Diner Polling.
You complain that we’re making blanket statements, but at the very least, we’re engaging with something we can all verify, something we can source and back up.
All we really have in your case is… well, your word. And your word and the reporting doesn’t particularly seem to match up, and you’ve not done the work to explain why that is.
Or, for instance, the lived experience of other posters who have connections to these industries and their workers. The gap remains and somehow you never even try to bridge it.
Also
One where the - my words - novelty of talking to some big city liberal often spurs some pretty deep and interesting / introspective conversations? Yes, clearly I think they are subhuman autonomations who are lost to AM radio and Fox News propoganda.
This part here feels like a kind of gross framing! Like there’s a kind of othering at play here that feels like you are not aware of and it’s kind of weird!
So how many of you people posting about the lower class have EVER been under the poverty line? Cuz I'm pretty sure most of you are like, tech professionals and office workers and shit. There is a grim calculous that the poor must undertake, and sadly, business ethics don't really apply when you need to buy fucking food.
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
And yet, you seem to be one of the people on the boards most furiously dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Fascinating.
Edit: must've been nice, being in a solid union family, good benefits and all. My mom raised four teenage boys in 30k a year, with my dad constantly in and out of the hospital. You ever had sleep for dinner, friend?
Edit 2: also, you know what? Yes, I do thi k that people who've never experienced poverty, and I mean POVERTY, should get to talk about what decisions coal miners make to feed their families. Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
Yes friend, I have.
And I'm not going to get into a hard times olympics dick measuring contest so all I'm going to say is you don't know me so stop presuming you do.
I know you plenty, pard. You're not some big mystery. You're a liberal in a cozy profession who wants to maintain the status quo because they benefit from it. It's not like it's a difficult puzzle to solve. The fact that you, apparently, have struggled at some point in your life, and then look at other people struggling and just throw your hands up and say "well, they chose to be poor and exploited, there's just nothing we can do about it" tells me everything I need to know about you.
I genuinely understand why you are mad and have contempt for anyone who isn't presently, at this moment, struggling day to day to get by and has the temerity to disagree with you, but no. You don't know me or my life or my experiences. Like I said before though, I'm not going to race to the bottom to prove my hard times bona fides because its pointless gatekeeping to must have an annual income <$x (and not sit at a desk) to participate in a discussion about labor.
The contempt you have for people who are comfortable at the moment though is pretty clear and just straight up crab bucket thinking. I make a good income and my wife does as well, and we have the luxury of being in the right time and the freedom to make choices that secured us, but we're still one bad illness / accident or job loss away from some really hard times.
To bring this back on topic of labor, there's a reason that anti-labor movements have so strongly targeted and emphasized the divide between the blue collar 'working' class and the white collar 'administrative' class. There's a reason that IT people tend to reject labor instead of seeing themselves as the skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen they are. And while a lot of that is propoganda from the top, a lot of that is the bile that comes from people who are trying to better their lives from below.
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
False equivalence.
Nope. You keep wanting to act like industrialization was like the worst thing to happen to labour while ignoring what conditions were actually like before that.
Neither Hacksaw nor Lanz nor anyone else in this thread has advocated for a return to a pre-industrialization society, so please knock off this strawman nonsense. If people choose to celebrate workers rising up and destroying the machines that displaced them, it's not that we want to return to the stone age, it's that we are celebrating a worker uprising against an oppressive owner class that exists only to exploit then discard the workers.
No, that's exactly what y'all have been doing this whole time. You are romanticizing people fighting industrialization and automation as being the little guy fighting back against the man. A conception of history that completely ignores both that actual changes involved and the fact that said "oppressive owner class" were around before as well because they owned the damn factory that employed these people before hand.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
Well, they were the Luddites. But what you gotta remember is that the historic Luddites weren’t a bunch of anti-technology conservatives, as the term is now used, but were a militant labor revolt against capital, who’d replaced them with machines, leaving them to die in the ditches of destitution.
Ahh yes, cause if there's one thing we all miss, it's pre-industrial society...
I think it was more about how capitalism seems to always leave the poor to die in a ditch and less about them being luddites or something.
I'm not sure what the alternative is here to people doing work that is replaced by automation. It seems much more to be an overly romanticized image of people "fighting the man" or something. Where the man in this case is the industrialized production.
Also, as a random sidenote, the popularly thought of etymology for sabotage is wrong from anything I've ever read. It is apparently derived from the word sabot but not specifically from people throwing said sabot into machines.
Not really! You’re kind of downplaying just how large a movement this was at the time and the influence it had on society:
The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. Most were trained artisans who had spent years learning their craft, and they feared that unskilled machine operators were robbing them of their livelihood. When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. They called themselves “Luddites” after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have wrecked a textile apparatus in 1779.
There’s no evidence Ludd actually existed—like Robin Hood, he was said to reside in Sherwood Forest—but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. The protestors claimed to be following orders from “General Ludd,” and they even issued manifestoes and threatening letters under his name.
The first major instances of machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside. Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers. The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death.
The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812, when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. It wasn’t until the 20th century that their name re-entered the popular lexicon as a synonym for “technophobe.”
Except that's just describing what I said. In the end these people are no different then coal miners opposing green energy or modern labourers opposing automation. There is no romanticism or gain in holding on to a world where stuff costs more and takes longer and gets made in smaller quantities. Pre-industrial manufacturing is not a great victory for labour.
You are utterly ignoring the human costs here.
No one here is arguing that we should go back to some kind of pre-industrial level of society, but you cannot deny that automation has long been utilized by the owner class as a method to break labor and deny them the ability to provide for themselves on their skills and services because the owner class views them not as people who need money to survive and thrive in a market society, but as costs on a spreadsheet, a drain on company revenues, etc.
You are trying to chalk this up to a sort of Irrationality of the Antiquated because that better serves your viewpoint and comfort rather than engage with the reality that coal miners or the Luddites do/did what they do/did from a rational perspective constructed from a hostile economic environment (with attendant cultural issues cultivated by that hostility) that is largely designed by the ownership class and their allies in the ruling classes, because they know full well what those changes mean for them: the dissolution of their livelihoods and a society that will refuse to do anything to make a place for them other than the dredges of destitution. It’s a cold and heartless economic darwinism, one which cruelly treats human beings as a resource to be exploited by the ownership class in service to a cancerous capitalism obsessed with little more than its continued, endless growth.
The coal miners make the decisions they make because they would personally rather work high paying jobs even if the consequences of them continuing to work those jobs is millions of future deaths.
You are right, it's not like there weren't generations spent making sure that coal mining (like a lot of factory jobs in other places) were seen as THE jobs, with really good pay and attendant social status in areas. When you start factoring in their neighbors livestyles, especially in the last couple decades with much lower incomes, of COURSE they are going to take the selfish route out. Most people would.
To dismiss it as personal greed is such a disconnected trainwreck of an idea I'm not even going to engage it further.
The impetus for "...making sure coal mining were seen as THE jobs..." was from the rich coal mine owners, not from the lower middle class coal miners. What you're doing is victim blaming..
I uh.... that was my entire fucking point. I was trying to explain to people blaming the miners for why they would want to hold onto what they had WASN'T the fault of the miners in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM other than not wanting to end up collapsing into the drug addled depths of society that they've seen grow up around them as money has moved out of their areas.
To be clear: In Labor, despite some specific disagreements on a few things here and there, I'm going to generally line up with Hacksaw and others when it comes to labor, if you EVER think I'm coming down on the side of Capital you are misreading me or there is a VERY specific point I'm making.
Ah yes, the Gilded Age, notable for its catalyzing labor moments like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the Ludlow Massacre. What a time to be alive as a worker, and then shortly thereafter killed either through employer negligence or outright murder.
Cause the pre-industrial revolution was such a great time to be alive.
False equivalence.
Nope. You keep wanting to act like industrialization was like the worst thing to happen to labour while ignoring what conditions were actually like before that.
Neither Hacksaw nor Lanz nor anyone else in this thread has advocated for a return to a pre-industrialization society, so please knock off this strawman nonsense. If people choose to celebrate workers rising up and destroying the machines that displaced them, it's not that we want to return to the stone age, it's that we are celebrating a worker uprising against an oppressive owner class that exists only to exploit then discard the workers.
No, that's exactly what y'all have been doing this whole time. You are romanticizing people fighting industrialization and automation as being the little guy fighting back against the man. A conception of history that completely ignores both that actual changes involved and the fact that said "oppressive owner class" were around before as well because they owned the damn factory that employed these people before hand.
I mean if you wanna get into Dialectical Materialism, there’s plenty of Marxists here who’d be more than happy to get into that with you.
Like no one here is saying the owner class didn’t exist before the industrial revolution. It’s existed in one way or another since humans formed social power hierarchies.
And you’re still ignoring the human costs of the way industrialization was implemented across economies! Industrialization was by no mean some kind of pure advancement of society that improved everyone’s lives, people were absolutely immisserated by the process, be it being cut loose by no longer being needed, through oppressive working conditions where health and safety dangers were ignored, etc.
You seem to want to make this argument that industrialization was a universal good, wholly without drawback or cost in its implementation. and that its contemporary opponents were effectively a group of backwards reactionaries, without even once engaging with the idea that industrialization’s benefits were primarily tilted towards the people who owned industry, and where the labor force was regarded as just another part or resource to be used and cast aside when no longer useful.
Posts
Nope. You keep wanting to act like industrialization was like the worst thing to happen to labour while ignoring what conditions were actually like before that.
The miners literally do not want that, they wish to remain coal miners.
https://umwa.org/news-media/news/union-leader-cecil-roberts-says-eliminating-fossil-fuels-is-a-deal-breaker/
No, you are the one ignoring the human cost. You are the one complaining about the poor coal miners losing their jobs and not looking at what coal mining or it's replacement with more green energy actually does to society at large. "Society at large" being, you know, humans. Lots of them. You wanna spin a fantasy of the poor pre-industrial artisan workers cruelly losing their livelihoods while ignoring what that actually does for everyone. Automation isn't some random bit of cruelty inflicted upon people by maniacal evil bosses. It's massive gains in efficiency and production and lowering of costs. That's why it's always been done.
The Democratic Candidate before Biden also had a plan to try to turn Coal regions into something else, and we can see what obviously happened there.
It doesn't matter why they don't want to stop being coal miners. That's not the argument at hand. The point is that we are all better off if people stop mining and using coal as much as possible. And that coal miners getting to keep their jobs is not some fucking great victory for labour rights.
If you aren’t willing to do those things at the minimum, then don’t gripe about those people making the only living they can afford to
there was like 30 billion pledged for infrastructure changes, support, education and research investment training, and so on.
They voted for Trump
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
At the same time I 100% don't give a fuck about coal miners when they reject support for them to move into other jobs and then vote for an asshole that very clearly never gave a shit about them and that, even if he did, was very obviously too incompetent to do anything at all to help them and the industry they're in that is rightly dying.
And not only that with the bolded, their homes also don’t have the infrastructure to support these new jobs! You can train people in new skills all you want, but if there arent any opportunities to do that work at a living wage they can’t use any of it to provide for themselves!
There’s a reason just about every article you read about the economic state of West Virginia includes the notion that folks feel the only chance for subsequent generations born there is to escape the damn state. There aren’t sufficient jobs there outside the mines that page a living wage for their residents.
So as much as it feels good for folks to be angry at individual coal miners who are ruining the planet with their coal jobs, it won’t do anything to actually end the system that keeps all this misery going. You have to build up something new that lets folks live and work with dignity and dismantle the old Immiseration Engine.
If you want people to stop clinging to coal mining for dear life, give them a stable economy where they’ll be safe in finally letting go of the cliff face
Well, they voted against that. Which is what we're talking about.
At present, the remaining coal miners are heavy equipment operators (and heavy equipment support personnel). The equipment they work with is largely specialized for their industry, but the skills needed to operate mining and support equipment as well as maintaining that equipment is highly portable from one industry to another. While coal mining is generally the steadiest and best paying working in the region for heavy equipment operators, skilled heavy equipment operators aren't lacking for work anywhere in the US.
The idea that these workers are either carrying their pickaxes to haul their 16 tons out each morning or their twelve kids are going to starve in the Appalachian shotgun shacks is completely detached from the reality of the modern coal industry. Most coal miners left are decidedly upper middle class blue collar workers like the UAW auto workers here in SE Michigan.
Yes, there are some lower paid positions in the industry as well that aren't in as high demand as equipment operators and mechanics and such but even in coal country you can make $12 / hour working at McDonalds being a warm body walking in the door.
1)
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From the far away land of 2009
The far away land of two years ago
That’s dudes in a fuckin’ mine shoveling shit onto conveyors to move it out of the mine. That’s folks riding a tiny ass elevator to get deep into the mines.
So yeah. The reality of coal mining is still folks going down into dank ass tunnels deep below the earth to dredge up shit
These aren’t your fuckin’ NYT “poll some diners in trump country.” This is actual investigative journalism where the reporters are actually doing their due diligence, and it’s be nice if people stopped relying on lazy catch alls that allow them to dismiss this kind of reporting when it doesn’t fit with their preconceived image of the folks they’re denigrating as trumpist rubes.
I'm not comfortable with people writing off entire electorates as deserving of whatever happens to them because of who got elected there regardless of party, but it's especially galling when it's an ostensibly Democratic politician who I am told we absolutely need to be in office.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
seriously? get fucked. i grew up food, housing and utility poor. who knew if it was gas or electric this month that was going to be off. Graduated high school at 6 foot 135 pounds because i was accustomed to eating being an option.
Just because people disagree with you doesn't mean you're right, or they have no context.
The impetus for "...making sure coal mining were seen as THE jobs..." was from the rich coal mine owners, not from the lower middle class coal miners. What you're doing is victim blaming..
Are you fucking gatekeeping participating in a discussion on labor based on people's current income?
Cause my dad, grandfather, and great grandfather were all card carrying UAW tradesmen and I grew up on picket lines and in union halls. Just because I'm now working in academic IT doesn't mean that I didn't grow up in an environment where we were struggling - at least during strikes / lay-offs - or went through times where the only reason we were able to turn the heat back on was because my dad could work endless amounts of OT at the plant. Granted the poverty-adjacent phases were more poor finances than pure lack of income.
So no, just because someone works in an office or IT today doesn't mean we don't have lived experience and knowledge to participate in this discussion or are unworthy for daring to disagree with you.
Like, these regions have been made dependent on the industry! The mines form the backbone of their local economies, and nothing has been done to actually replace it with something viable! And it’s the same damn story in each of these towns!
At some point you have to admit the problem isn’t the miners being insufficiently good, ecologically minded people and accept that there are wide spread systemic issues with over a century’s worth of policy that turned Appalachia into a resource extraction colony for the rest of the nation!
And you can’t fix wide spread systemic issues with individualized guilt; you have to actually tackle it with systemic-minded solutions!
Neither Hacksaw nor Lanz nor anyone else in this thread has advocated for a return to a pre-industrialization society, so please knock off this strawman nonsense. If people choose to celebrate workers rising up and destroying the machines that displaced them, it's not that we want to return to the stone age, it's that we are celebrating a worker uprising against an oppressive owner class that exists only to exploit then discard the workers.
Cool beans man, me too, I only make about $197 a month on state disability so if you really wanna bump chests over who had the worse upbringing financially we can definitely do that, but in the meantime I would like an answer as to why ostensibly democratic voters have such a low opinion of the working class other than meaningless fuckin horseshit in the face of the mercilessly grinding greed of the capitalists that are actually fuckin forcing these miners down the pit.
Fuck that. That's a goddamn betrayal. That's victim blaming. White-collar liberals love to point at the poor and say "see these ignorant rubes are the problem" while the politicians THEY VOTED FOR continue to cut checks to oil companies and extract wealth and resources from the global south.
Y'all ain't enlightened, you just get a little more sun up there in your fuckin ivory tower than the proles do down here on the ground.
Maybe I dunno, some of us spend a lot of time in Appalachia and have friends and neighbors who are card carrying coal miners that we talk to and have discussed the topic with.
They want to mine coal because they are typically some of (but not the only) good paying jobs in the area but that also doesn't mean there aren't other options available. There is always friction to changing jobs, but most of their skills are portable to other industries that are present in the area.
And yes, I will say flat out that when you discuss the possibility of other industries or jobs with at least some of them and the other opportunities that could come to the region, I've personally explicitly been told to my face 'I don't care, I'm not voting for HER'.
Dude you suggested one of the “other options” is a fucking $12 an hour gig at McDonalds
Hell, go back and watch the Vice piece; 950 job applicants for a 10-slot opening at one of those tech start ups. Like the guys there said, you can see the problem right there: people are tethered to coal because it’s the foundation of their economy, and when it goes it takes the entire region it supported down with it. These regions need new foundations for their economies, and pretending it’s the individual miners’ faults isn’t going to get that shit done
And yet, you seem to be one of the people on the boards most furiously dedicated to maintaining the status quo. Fascinating.
Edit: must've been nice, being in a solid union family, good benefits and all. My mom raised four teenage boys in 30k a year, with my dad constantly in and out of the hospital. You ever had sleep for dinner, friend?
Edit 2: also, you know what? Yes, I do thi k that people who've never experienced poverty, and I mean POVERTY, should get to talk about what decisions coal miners make to feed their families. Until you've had to decide between going down the mine (or back into the retail store, or back into the assembly line, or back into the kitchen) and being homeless, I don't wanna fuckin hear it.
What's wrong with a gig at McDonalds?
It's a solid secure job with benefits and opportunity for advancement. If the starting pay at McDonalds is comparable to the backbreaking miserable body and lung destroying jobs in the mines I don't see why you would denigrate working there or (as someone did earlier) in Walmart / retail as below them or not a valid option. Besides places paying $12 for McDonalds are typically going to have openings - even in rural Appalachia - that pay $15-18 for the skills a coal worker has.
Manufacturing and resource extraction generally suck and that's kind of the nature of the job. Most people who do those jobs hate it and its not just coal mining so telling me someone in a plant or mine hates what they are doing is no surprise.
I mean I’ll be blunt here Zag, honestly at times it feels like you and others talk about folks less like they’re rational human beings, with complex reasons for their behavior that are fundamentally influenced by their living conditions, and something more akin to frustrating right wing philosophical zombies.
Especially on the subject of coal miners.
Yes friend, I have.
And I'm not going to get into a hard times olympics dick measuring contest so all I'm going to say is you don't know me so stop presuming you do.
It doesn’t pay enough to live on. It fails the primary purpose of having a job.
It’s categorically none of the things you’ve said, and fast food worker is not a career known for its advancement
And again, it ignores the foundational economy in these places is Coal Mining. You cannot ignore this, because as people keep pointing out, the coal mines provide the economic basis that supports local businesses from hardware stores to fast food franchises etc. and when that collapses, there’s no more money coming in to keep those attendant businesses going; the economic source dries up, there’s no more money to spread into the rest of the economy to keep it going. There’s no more fuel, no more blood, the engine seizes up and the economic body dies.
You’re talking like a Republican talking head from the 90s and aughts at this point.
I know you plenty, pard. You're not some big mystery. You're a liberal in a cozy profession who wants to maintain the status quo because they benefit from it. It's not like it's a difficult puzzle to solve. The fact that you, apparently, have struggled at some point in your life, and then look at other people struggling and just throw your hands up and say "well, they chose to be poor and exploited, there's just nothing we can do about it" tells me everything I need to know about you.
I did. Because that job at Walmart isn’t going to pay anywhere near enough to take care of a family with kids. It’s not that the work is beneath them, it’s that it might as well be unemployment compared to a livable (if not thriving) wage. When you compare it to the $25+ an hour they’re getting working in coal, yeah, it’s insulting to tell someone they should just halve their income that was only just barely enough to begin with.
And let's compare the benefits packages of even salaried McDonald's employees to a coal miner's benefits, especially if they're union.
You literally just described everyone with a job.
You mean the p-zombies that are are my friends and neighbors who I frequently have multi-hour long conversations with about all kinds of topics?
One where the - my words - novelty of talking to some big city liberal often spurs some pretty deep and interesting / introspective conversations? Yes, clearly I think they are subhuman autonomations who are lost to AM radio and Fox News propoganda.
People are complicated and each of them is unique and has unique motivations.
But if you want to talk about a narrow topic - labor and coal mining / miners in Appalachia - that I have personal knowledge both of them individually and the region people are making blanket theoretical statements about, I'm going to share my own experiences and what I've seen and heard with my own eyes and ears and point out where you're trying to cram a square peg into a round hole.
The conversations are the same as talking to UAW workers in SE Michigan in 2008. And a good part of it is people don't want to be change even if the industry is dying around them and just want to be mad about it and hope someone fixes it instead of trying to change. The auto workers were lucky enough their industry is vital and just needed life support and not one that is basically already dead and just twitching. But the people remaining in the industry do have some options beyond living in a shack and starving to death, despite many of them frequently and feverently voting for people who would have them do just that.
Yeah, it's almost like capitalism has made slaves of all of us and is a system based on extortion and the threat of slow death by starvation. But to pretend that that system affects everyone equally is also pretty silly. A hedge fund manager can afford to not work for a while. A minimum wage worker can't miss a single day. If you can afford the luxury of like, taking a few weeks off to look for a new job, that puts you in a category above millions of other people.
Then it seems like maybe you’re not really listening to them if you keep making the arguments you are.
Like, the basis for this entire argument you’re making is “don’t listen to reporting, don’t listen to what these folk are saying when interviewed by journalistic professionals, I have the real inside track to the mind and status of the Appalachian coal miner. I know them, personally, you see! And they don’t actually want change, they just want conservatism and coal!”
And like there’s the fun part: I have no means of disproving that you know them, that you have had these conservasations. But yet at the same time, I present article after article, news report after news report, that runs counter to your claims and you, the person who has these connections never bridges the clear gap between the portrayals. You don’t even engage with the sourced reports outside of a general hand wave dismissal of NYT Diner Polling.
You complain that we’re making blanket statements, but at the very least, we’re engaging with something we can all verify, something we can source and back up.
All we really have in your case is… well, your word. And your word and the reporting doesn’t particularly seem to match up, and you’ve not done the work to explain why that is.
Or, for instance, the lived experience of other posters who have connections to these industries and their workers. The gap remains and somehow you never even try to bridge it.
Also
This part here feels like a kind of gross framing! Like there’s a kind of othering at play here that feels like you are not aware of and it’s kind of weird!
I genuinely understand why you are mad and have contempt for anyone who isn't presently, at this moment, struggling day to day to get by and has the temerity to disagree with you, but no. You don't know me or my life or my experiences. Like I said before though, I'm not going to race to the bottom to prove my hard times bona fides because its pointless gatekeeping to must have an annual income <$x (and not sit at a desk) to participate in a discussion about labor.
The contempt you have for people who are comfortable at the moment though is pretty clear and just straight up crab bucket thinking. I make a good income and my wife does as well, and we have the luxury of being in the right time and the freedom to make choices that secured us, but we're still one bad illness / accident or job loss away from some really hard times.
To bring this back on topic of labor, there's a reason that anti-labor movements have so strongly targeted and emphasized the divide between the blue collar 'working' class and the white collar 'administrative' class. There's a reason that IT people tend to reject labor instead of seeing themselves as the skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen they are. And while a lot of that is propoganda from the top, a lot of that is the bile that comes from people who are trying to better their lives from below.
No, that's exactly what y'all have been doing this whole time. You are romanticizing people fighting industrialization and automation as being the little guy fighting back against the man. A conception of history that completely ignores both that actual changes involved and the fact that said "oppressive owner class" were around before as well because they owned the damn factory that employed these people before hand.
I uh.... that was my entire fucking point. I was trying to explain to people blaming the miners for why they would want to hold onto what they had WASN'T the fault of the miners in ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM other than not wanting to end up collapsing into the drug addled depths of society that they've seen grow up around them as money has moved out of their areas.
To be clear: In Labor, despite some specific disagreements on a few things here and there, I'm going to generally line up with Hacksaw and others when it comes to labor, if you EVER think I'm coming down on the side of Capital you are misreading me or there is a VERY specific point I'm making.
I mean if you wanna get into Dialectical Materialism, there’s plenty of Marxists here who’d be more than happy to get into that with you.
Like no one here is saying the owner class didn’t exist before the industrial revolution. It’s existed in one way or another since humans formed social power hierarchies.
And you’re still ignoring the human costs of the way industrialization was implemented across economies! Industrialization was by no mean some kind of pure advancement of society that improved everyone’s lives, people were absolutely immisserated by the process, be it being cut loose by no longer being needed, through oppressive working conditions where health and safety dangers were ignored, etc.
You seem to want to make this argument that industrialization was a universal good, wholly without drawback or cost in its implementation. and that its contemporary opponents were effectively a group of backwards reactionaries, without even once engaging with the idea that industrialization’s benefits were primarily tilted towards the people who owned industry, and where the labor force was regarded as just another part or resource to be used and cast aside when no longer useful.