Read the full blog on www.kftc.org
The Daily Yonder is a terrific website devoted to issues facing rural America. Today it features an important story that examines – and takes apart – a claim made by the Washington Post that coal mining provides “most of the region’s jobs.” The entire post is worth reading. It’s written by Bill Bishop (formerly a reporter with the Lexington-Herald Leader) and Tim Marema (who lived and worked in Whitesburg, Kentucky during the 1990′s).
The authors begin by pointing out the obvious.
“This claim is not even close to being true….In fact, coal in Appalachia is a declining source of employment in southern Appalachia, as the chart on this page shows.”
The Decline of Appalachian Coal Data compiled by Downstream Strategies in Morgantown, West Virginia, found that coal employment in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia has dropped by about half since 1983.
The Daily Yonder writers looked at actual employment data for Wise County, VA, which was the focus of the Washington Post article. Although Wise County is located in the heart of Virginia’s coal fields, mining jobs provided just 11.5% of county employment there in 2004, fewer than the jobs in retail (14.1%) or government (21.7%).
