This is one of the latest ideas backed by President Trump.
I know a little bit about the Pennsylvania coal mining business, but nothing about, say, West Virginia or Kentucky. Harlan County, USA, a 1976 Oscar-winning documentary, paints an ugly picture of what the mining life was like back then.
The mines in eastern PA were pretty much destroyed by flooding in 1951. They’re unlikely, in my view, to reopen. The life of miners back then, was pretty awful.
The mine owners didn’t hire and pay wages directly to miners. Instead, they rented mining time in a specific underground area to a crew of miners organized by a third-party foreman. The owner would buy the output. But the foreman and the crew took all the risk of the coal seam being sub-par or that operating problems–like injury, cave-in, explosion, noxious gas–might occur (hence, the canaries) . The actual coal seams where miners spent their days were typically only about 3’x3′, on the idea that what we might imagine as tunnels were only wasted space. It’s not something you’d wish on anyone else. Hard to understand why anyone could consider a return to the mines to be an aspirational goal.