August 20, 2016
That’s what readers of a NYT article on support for Trump in West Virginia must be wondering. The piece told readers that Trump was promising to bring back the coal mining jobs to the state. While West Virgina used to have many more jobs in coal mining, that was decades ago.
Employment in coal mining had fallen from a peak of more than 130,000 in 1940 to just over 21,000 in 2000, roughly its current level. Employment did rise somewhat in the last decade, reaching 35,700 in December of 2011. (This was a bit less than 5.0 percent of total employment in the state.) However, it began to decline back to its current level the following year, largely due to the availability of cheap natural gas from fracking.
It’s not clear what Trump’s reference point is in his promise to bring back mining jobs. He could mean the peak hit during President Obama’s first term in office, which would re-employ roughly 14,000 miners. It’s not clear who would use the coal — Trump has not indicated that he wants to restrict fracking — but few thought that West Virginia was thriving in 2011.
It is possible that Trump is referring to the more distant past when West Virginia had more than 40,000 jobs in coal mining, but this would mean going back to the 1970s, more than 40 years ago. The main reason for the decline in coal mining jobs over the next decades was increased productivity in the industry, as strip mining replaced underground mining. If Trump intends to restore the number of jobs to the pre-1980 level then perhaps he would ban more efficient strip mining and make the industry rely exclusively on underground mining again.
Note on Source:
Several comments ask about the source for the figure. It comes from the website Appalachian Voices, which I gather is a community organization in West Virgina. Unfortunately, I could not find their source, but since it follows closely data from the BLS for mining employment (which can include mining of other minerals), I felt comfortable using it. (Those data are available in their discontinued data series.) Sorry about leaving it out initially. As far as the years since 2008, these data are available from BLS in the Current Employment Series giving state level data. This series goes up through June of 2016, but only as far back as 1996.
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