“I’m going to do everything I can to help,” I told him. “Whether or not people in West Virginia support me, I’m going to support you.”
Bo looked at me and pointed to the photograph of his children. “Those are the three faces I had to come home and explain to that I didn’t have a job,” he said. “Those are the three faces I had to come home to and explain that we’re going to find a way; that God would provide for us, one way or another, that I was not worried, and I had to try to keep a brave face so they would understand.”
He said that earlier in the day he had picked up his young son from school and suggested they stop to get something to eat. “No, Daddy,” his son replied, “I don’t want us to use up our money.” It was hard to hear that.
After the meeting ended, I went off to the side with Bo and Lauren. I wanted to let them know I appreciated their candor. Bo told me how he leaned on his Christian faith in a difficult time. It was everything to him. I shared a little about my faith, and, for a minute, we were just three people bonding over the wisdom of the prophet Micah: “To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Bo was a proud man, but he knew he and his community needed help. Why, he asked, weren’t there more programs in place already to help people who were ready and willing to work to find good jobs to replace the ones that had disappeared? Why wasn’t there anywhere for someone like him to turn? I told him about my plans to bring new employers to the area and to support small businesses like his wife’s. They weren’t going to solve the region’s problems overnight, but they would help make life better. And if we could get some positive results, people might start believing again that progress was possible. But I knew that campaign promises would go only so far. As we drove off for Charleston, I called my husband. “Bill, we have to help these people.”
How do we help give people in rural counties such as Mingo and McDowell a fighting chance?
The most urgent need right now is to stop the Trump administration from making things a whole lot worse.
I hope by the time you read this, Republicans will have failed to repeal Obamacare, but that’s far from certain. Trump’s health care plan would have devastating consequences in poor and rural areas, especially for older people and families who rely on Medicaid. And at a time when opiate addiction is ravaging communities across rural America, Trump and Republicans in Congress proposed scrapping the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurers cover mental health services and addiction treatment. It alarms me to think about what this would mean for the recovering addicts, family members, doctors, counselors, and police officers I met in West Virginia and across the country who were all struggling to deal with the consequences of this epidemic.
Beyond health care, Trump wants to eliminate nearly all federal support for economic diversification and development in Coal Country. He’s proposed shutting down the Appalachian Regional Commission, which has invested more than $387 million in West Virginia alone, helped create thousands of jobs, and supported community efforts such as the Williamson Health and Wellness Center. Appalachia needs more investment, not less; more access to fast, affordable, and reliable broadband for businesses and homes; more high-quality training programs that do a better job of matching students to jobs that actually exist, not just providing certificates that look nice in a frame on the wall but don’t lead anywhere; and incentives such as the New Markets Tax Credit that can attract new employers beyond the coal industry and build a more sustainable economy.
Trump’s promises are ringing increasingly hollow. After the election, he took a lot of credit for persuading the air-conditioning maker Carrier to keep hundreds of manufacturing jobs in Indiana rather than moving them to Mexico. Since then, we’ve learned it was essentially a bait and switch: Carrier received millions in subsidies from taxpayers and is still shipping out 630 jobs anyway. That kind of bait and switch shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s followed Trump’s career.
Trump also promised to reopen coal mines and revive the industry to its former glory. But despite what he says, and what a lot of people want to believe, the hard truth is that coal isn’t coming back. As Trump’s own director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, admitted in a moment of candor in May 2017, “Coal doesn’t even make that much sense anymore.” Politicians owe it to communities that have relied on the industry for generations to be honest about the future.
The entire debate over coal unfolds in a kind of alternative reality. Watching the news and listening to political speeches, you’d think coal is the only industry in West Virginia. Yet the truth is that the number of coal miners has been shrinking since the end of World War II. During the 1960s, fewer than fifty thousand West Virginians worked in the mines. By the end of the eighties, it was fewer than twenty-eight thousand. The numbers have gone up and down as the price of coal fluctuates, but it’s been twenty-five years since the industry accounted for even 5 percent of total employment in the state. Today far more West Virginians work in education and health care, which makes protecting the Affordable Care Act vital to protecting West Virginian jobs.
Across the country, Americans have more than twice as many jobs producing solar energy as they do mining coal. And think about this: since 2001, a half million jobs in department stores across the country have disappeared. That’s many times more than were lost in coal mining. Just between October 2016 and April 2017, about eighty-nine thousand Americans lost jobs in retail—more than all the people who work in coal mining put together. Yet coal continues to loom much larger in our politics and national imagination.
More broadly, we remain locked into an outdated picture of the working class in America that distorts our policy priorities. A lot of the press coverage and political analysis since the election has taken as a given that the “real America” is full of middle-aged white men who wear hard hats and work on assembly lines—or did until Obama ruined everything. There are certainly people who fit that description, and they deserve respect and every chance to make a decent living. But fewer than 10 percent of Americans today work in factories and on farms, down from 36 percent in 1950. Most working-class Americans have service jobs. They’re nurses and medical technicians, childcare providers and computer coders. Many of them are people of color and women. In fact, roughly two-thirds of all minimum-wage jobs in America are held by women.
Repealing Obamacare or starting a trade war with China won’t do anything to make these Americans’ lives better. But raising the minimum wage would. It would help a lot. So would a large program to build and repair our bridges, tunnels, roads, ports, and airports and expand high-speed internet access to neglected areas. Strengthening unions and making it easier for workers to organize and bargain for better pay and benefits would help rebuild the middle class. Supporting overstretched families with paid leave and more affordable childcare and elder care would make a huge difference. So would a “public option” for health care and allowing more people to buy into Medicare and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs.
The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America.