The Mechanization of Coal Mining and Its Effects on West Virginia’s Coal Industry Employment
Mountaintop removal in West Virginia has proven to be both extremely beneficial and extremely detrimental to various societies and their respective economies. For more than a century, West Virginia’s southern counties have been ruled by a coal-centered power. The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the construction of company towns throughout the coal-rich valleys of southern West Virginia, where larger towns were scarce and where workers were frequently brought into the area for the explicit purpose of mining coal, the number of miners living in these communities made up more than 70 percent of the total population (Burns 2007). Since the 1950s, mechanization in the mines and, more recently, the advent of mountaintop removal coal mining have radically reduced the number of mining jobs throughout Central Appalachia, and West Virginia in particular (Burns 2007). In 1948 there were 131,700 coal miners in West Virginia, while in 2006 there were only 20,100 (Bell and York 2010). As figure 1 shows, since the 1940s, coal production in West Virginia has seemingly stayed the same while coal employment there has clearly decreased tremendously.
Below I have included a graph to introduce the increasing separation between the production of coal in West Virginia and the number of coal-mine workers, visualizing the effects of automating the coal-mining process through mountaintop removal and other industrial advancements.
Citations
Burns, Shirley Stewart. Bringing down the Mountains: the Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia Communities, 1970–2004. West Virginia University Press, 2007.
Simply put, this article dives into the effects of MTR since it’s debut, in West Virginia, in 1970. Furthermore, this study focuses on the various impacts this newest form of coal mining has had on coal communities in the nine southernmost West Virginia counties where it takes place, and on the UMWA’s declining influence as a traditional counterweight in southern West Virginia. The social, economic, political and environmental consequences are also explored.
Robinson, Cara. “An Exploration of Poverty in Central Appalachia: Questions of Culture, Industry, and Technology.” KOME − An International Journal of Pure Communication Inquiry, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015, pp. 75–89., doi:10.17646/KOME.2015.26.
This resource reviews the role of culture and technology in fighting poverty for a by exploring the relationship between technology and poverty-stricken communities as well as the way in which social issues in the central Appalachian region are being talked about throughout the media and online.
Bell, Shannon Elizabeth, and Richard York. “Community Economic Identity: The Coal Industry and Ideology Construction in West Virginia.” Rural Sociology, vol. 75, no. 1, 2010, pp. 111–143., doi:10.1111/j.1549–0831.2009.00004.x.
This article addresses the economic changes and the machinations of the treadmill of production that have dramatically reduced the level of employment provided by extractive industries, such as mining and timber, in the United States and other high-capital nations after World War II.
