You can't teach old dogs new tricks.
That's how snot-nosed young Progressives, many of whose idea of hard work is pulling an all-nighter studying for finals, view folks who have invested their bodies, health, and lives in a job that has been as much of a career for them as IT is for a computer nerd.
As someone who has had an IT career as a computer nerd and has for the past 10 years, I don't think you can compare coding to being a coal miner. As a computer programmer I sat in an air-conditioned, brightly lit room on a comfortable chair, and the only time I needed to get up was when I wanted the exercise. My shifts were seven and a half hours with an hour for lunch, and if I wanted to spent some time browsing the Internet, or hey, even Atlas, it was no biggie. And if I got fired, no biggie, because I don't have a family, a home, or a mortgage.
Coal miners do much more physical work, it's more continuously demanding, it's certainly more tiring, their shifts are often longer. They work underground in dark, often claustrophic spaces, with harmful chemicals in the air. They get dirty. There is the risk of accidents, although thankfully now due to regulations it isn't as much as before. If they support a family, they can't afford to lose their job. The parts of the country they live in aren't glamorous. I have a lot of respect for coal miners.
It's upsetting that my party, in its concern for environmental protection and climate science, both of which I believe in, have acted against the economic interests of this group. In my view, people should not be treated as a commodity who can simply be discarded when the "market" or a government priority changes to squeeze their profession, coal miners included. They are, after all, human beings, often with dependents. Retraining is not always a solution to this. If a person has worked in a job for a long time, if a person is older, they will reasonably not be easily trained to do something else, and even if they are, that something else may not pay as well or may cause social dislocation. What we need is to take this into account, and frankly, I believe, smooth over labor market changes so that some people are paid to work in a job even if the "market" says otherwise, until they can retire. So instead of just closing a mine or factory, there should be a slow transition where new people stop being hired, those who can retire retire, and those who want to retrain can retrain, but not everyone is fired all at once.
