Almost 900,000 miners labored in U.S. coal mines during peak employment in the 1920s. In 2019, that number was fewer than 53,000, the lowest on record, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The numbers plummeted with automation, and fell again when natural gas, mostly extracted through hydraulic fracking technology, outcompeted coal in price.
Today, coal workers and their families who depend on mining for their livelihoods face an existential crisis. Cecil Roberts has been president of the United Mine Workers of America, the UMWA, for the past quarter century. He’s from a coal-mining family in southern West Virginia in […]
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