Volume 4,
No.3
Fall 1998
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Articles:
On-Going Research in Estimating Local Areas: CES
and National Opinion Research Center Collaborating
Where Have All The Miners Gone?
Where Have All the
Miners Gone?
By: Mike Vessell and Dennis Hofffman
Heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, electricians, environmental experts...What do they have in common? Along with a variety of other highly skilled technicians, the title “coal miner” may be applied to each one. What’s happened to all these skilled coal miners who lost their jobs during the mid-1990s? Some miners retired. Others found work in other states. A few found work in other Illinois mines or moved into other occupations. Many laid off miners also took advantage of JTPA training or relocation assistance.
Past issues of the Illinois Labor Market Review featured the coal mining industry in Illinois, reporting its decline, the reasons for its deterioration, and effects on the community. In many instances, coal mining industry employment losses were offset by new prison jobs as Southern Illinois communities aggressively worked to get state prisons to move into the region. In this article, we’ll focus on what happened to the Illinois miners who lost their jobs.
To determine what career decisions out-of-work miners made, the records from Man-Tra-Con, SDA 25’s delivery agent for the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), were analyzed. Service Delivery Area (SDA) 25 is a five-county region which is located in the heart of Illinois coal country.
Between July 1993 and November 1997, fourteen layoffs/mine closure events involving approxmately 2,160 miners impacted the coal industry within SDA 25. As of November 1997, 1,420 miners were out of work. Sixty percent (851) enrolled in some type of job training assistance program sponsored by JTPA. Nearly fifty-eight percent (491) of the participants left the program to take a job. Three percent (40) of the miners sought relocation assistance through JTPA and ten percent (145) opted for retirement. This left approximately twenty-seven percent (384) of the unemployed whose career decisions were unknown.
At the end of 1997 and during part of 1998, as coal mines were in the process of closing, an additional 1,124 area miners faced lay offs and career decisions.
To understand the plight of
the laid-off miner, imagine losing a $20.00+/hour job in a rural region
where employment opportunities and wages/benefits are scarce and the average
income is less than the statewide average. In a related report Rich Reinhold,
of IDES’ Economic Information & Analysis Division, investigated
the earning power of the dislocated coal miners. The IDES
study on the post layoff earnings of 430 miners one year after layoff
disclosed that former miners had the lowest reemployment rates (50 percent)
and had an earnings replacement percentage of only 52 percent (approximately
$10.00 per hour)! Man-Tra-Con data on training completers indicates an
average wage of $9.00 per hour for that group. Sixty-six percent of the
miners who claimed Unemployment Insurance benefits exhausted their benefits
after six months. Options for the dislocated miners included relocation
assistance, schooling to acquire a new skill, and for some, retirement.
A significant number of the miners took advantage of available programs
to ease the shock of losing their employment.
| It's easy to see how unemployment rates were affected by mine closings in the coal counties, especially from 1979 to 1983 when the number of mines decreased from 79 to 39 | |||||||||||
| COUNTY |
1979
|
1981
|
1983
|
1985
|
1987
|
1989
|
1991
|
1993
|
1995
|
1996
|
1997
|
| FRANKLIN |
10.0
|
13.9
|
19.6
|
16.9
|
17.3
|
13.8
|
13.9
|
14.5
|
11.0
|
12.4
|
11.8
|
| GALLATIN |
10.9
|
20.3
|
20.3
|
16.6
|
16.9
|
14.0
|
9.9
|
15.0
|
10.2
|
8.5
|
8.1
|
| JEFFERSON |
8.1
|
10.8
|
16.2
|
13.8
|
15.7
|
10.5
|
12.5
|
10.6
|
7.2
|
8.7
|
7.7
|
| PERRY |
7.1
|
11.8
|
17.0
|
14.2
|
17.7
|
12.5
|
16.7
|
17.4
|
11.3
|
12.4
|
10.8
|
| RANDOLPH |
5.4
|
8.4
|
12.6
|
9.3
|
10.3
|
8.3
|
8.4
|
11.3
|
7.0
|
11.2
|
7.4
|
| SALINE |
10.0
|
16.1
|
18.7
|
15.1
|
14.3
|
11.5
|
11.0
|
16.3
|
11.3
|
9.8
|
9.5
|
| WILLIAMSON |
10.5
|
15.5
|
18.4
|
16.6
|
13.5
|
10.5
|
10.5
|
12.8
|
8.5
|
9.2
|
8.1
|
| ILLINOIS |
5.5
|
8.5
|
11.4
|
9.0
|
7.4
|
6.0
|
7.2
|
7.5
|
5.2
|
5.3
|
4.7
|
| UNITED STATES |
5.8
|
7.6
|
9.6
|
7.2
|
6.2
|
5.3
|
6.8
|
6.9
|
5.6
|
5.4
|
4.9
|
For those miners
willing to relocate, the Alabama, Kentucky and Wyoming coal fields were
possible destinations. Contacts with mining officials in those states
resulted in only fragmented data. Mining officials in Alabama noticed
“a few Illinois miners showing up in classroom training situations.”
Kentucky officials recall “some but not a significant number”
of Illinois miners entering the labor force. Only Wyoming appears to have
a sizable universe of Illinois miners and has made a study relating to
that group. By tracking social security numbers that were issued in other
states, Wyoming Employment Security analysts have concluded that there
were nearly 300 mining workers from Illinois. Using social security numbers,
they determined that 3.5 percent of their mining employees were former
Illinoisans. Wages were comparable for miners in both states: Illinois
miners in Wyoming had an average weekly wage of $841 for the third quarter
of 1995 compared to an average weekly wage for miners in Illinois of $868
for the third quarter of 1996.
Though often overlooked by
the general public, especially since the emergence of the more glamorous
fuels --oil and natural gas-- coal has traditionally been the single most
important fuel in United States history. The rapid decline of the Illinois
coal industry (see chart) has had devastating effects on families and
labor markets in southern Illinois. Mining families have been forced to
make difficult decisions concerning relocation, drastic pay cuts, retraining,
and retirement. Few of the career choices made by laid off miners had
satisfactory outcomes in terms of pay, reemployment, and location for
the miners. A simple analysis of these data suggests that Illinois miners
who chose to relocate suffered little or no monetary loss, while those
who chose to stay in Illinois had, for the short term at least, a significant
loss of wages. Many towns, school districts, and organizations have had
to deal with a declining tax base caused by the loss of taxpayers to the
community. For Illinois coal mining communities, a way of life and standard
of living in existence for the past century has now nearly vanished.