The alternatives that coal miners have are garbage. They are being asked to leave union jobs with decent pay, decent benefits, protection from unfair treatment, and embrace radically lower pay, radically worse benefits, and active unfair treatment. You can't expect anyone to get excited by those prospects. If computers were outlawed tomorrow, would you sign up to stock shelves at Walmart with a smile on your face and with desire to gather in the mornings and sing the Walmart loyalty chant or whatever it is they sing?

> he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.

That's the first sentence of the article. You're telling me that in a list of over one hundred course, covering everything from computer programming to nursing, there's nothing with pay and benefits comparable to coal mining?

I wouldn't be thrilled with it, but sure I'd take the Walmart job if I could get it. I've done worse jobs before.

There’s definitely an issue with retraining people who’ve had a job over twenty years and only know one thing and now we’re trying to train them to something diff and doesn’t pay as well... but I think there are folks who are more flexible, people in their prime working years who can be enticed if given the proper incentives.

If any industry is going to be killed, like coal, I think there should be retraining of course but you also need to create jobs in the area that the other jobs are going away in.

When NAFTA was being negotiated, there was similar talk of retraining all the blue collars. There were blue jean factories in Western NC, once they left there were no jobs to move into. Training or not.

Now it is easy to say, "Move to where the jobs are" but for someone who owns a house in an area but has little to no other assets, this is not a solution.