Question:
Are there any coal mines hiring, mom is looking for a job and she has about
15 yrs experience. Even these pictures I took of Kentucky strip mining don't
convince her its a bad idea.
http://altnature.com/Herb_festival_KY.htm
Answer:
A couple of years ago when a federal judge quashed a permit for Arch
Mineral in Southern WV there were in excess of four hundred surface
miners laid off from tht facility. When a portion of that project
finally did get approval, it is my understanding that ARch Mineral had
some difficulty in that of those laid off most had left the area.
They had to go outside of the "panel" to fill the jobs. There will be
some jobs in Eastern Ky and WV for a few years. Western KY, Southern
Ohio, Indiana, and Southern Ill are pretty much history because of the
high Sulphur content.
I'm afraid you need to go a step beyond that, and ask what you mean by 'coal
miners'.
Here are a few stereotypical images......
grimy sweaty, (half-)naked men, scrabbling underground to extract coal with
picks.....
ditto, but now with conveyor belts and power tools......
barefoot women and children scavenging for coal scraps off slag piles....
gleaming men and women sat atop gleaming modern machinery that literally
blasts the coal out of the ground.....
I did this argument about a year ago, and realised about half way through
that my imagery of coal mining really relied much more on the older images.
And if you go searching for references to mining down the ages, you get lots
of evidence about how women were not very involved in the Industrial
Revolution end of coal mining, when it was probably at its most dangerous
and most labour intensive.
In the UK, laws were passed in the middle of the 19th century banning women
and children from working in mines, and those laws lasted until very
recently in historic terms.
Then I started to find modern mining references.... and the gleaming clean
machines started to emerge.
So it really depends on what you are trying to prove. If this is just an
angels on pinheads argument to the effect that 'women never mined', you are
doomed to lose it, since of course there always have been some doing it and
more are employed in 'the mining industry' today than there used to be.
On the other hand, if you are trying to use evidence from mining to make an
argument about women shunning jobs with a heavy manual component, then the
evidence is pretty good. Because they just didn't do it - any more than
they did a lot of other trad jobs until they were made a hundred times
easier by modern technology.
And going back to your mortality stats.... I suspect if you look closely you
will find different types of mining going on, and different roles within
those types of mining - with higher death rates being common in some types
and some roles.
