Given that the historic strength of the labour movement in West Virginia was based on the UMWA and (to a lesser extent) the USW and given that the coal and steel industries are basically RIP with those unions really only existing as legacy organisations this is a primarily a symbolic blow. But a nasty one.
It is a poor electoral decision for the coal companies to endorse union-killing though.
Yes, but they did
that decades ago. People always forget - I suppose because the region is so utterly peripheral - that the remaining large UMWA dominated mines in central Appalachia pretty much all shut in the 1980s and 90s.
