Coal Jobs Matter a Lot ... in Coal Country

You know the standard line these days on coal: It's economically insignificant, employing fewer people nationwide than the Arby's fast-food chain. It's been on a long decline, pushed aside in electricity generation by cleaner natural gas and renewables. And it's not coming back -- people need to get over it and move on.

There's something to these arguments. I've made versions of most of them in past columns. In May, coal mining companies employed only 51,000 people in the U.S. -- less than not only Arby's but also Southwest Airlines, Morgan Stanley and Bed, Bath & Beyond (just to name a few corporations in a similar size range). That amounted to just 0.03 percent of total nonfarm payroll employment, and while the coal industry creates jobs beyond just the companies digging for coal, it has clearly become a tiny factor in the overall labor market.

Some of that tininess is new, though: As recently as January 2012, coal mining employment was 89,700 -- the highest it had been since the mid-1990s. And while even then coal mining didn't amount to much on a national scale, it was quite significant in some of the states (Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois and Pennsylvania are the big five coal producers, in that order, and another 10 states produce in significant quantities1496841355035) and especially the counties where it is mined. In the 10 counties with the most people working in coal mining in January 2012, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the industry accounted for a much more noticeable 3.8 percent of payroll employment. Throw out the three largely urban counties with a lot of other stuff going on,1496842092486 and it's up to 21.9 percent of employment. Coal mining pays a lot better than most of the other work one can find in a rural area, so its share of total wages was even higher: 39.4 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

So in coal mining counties, coal mining really matters. It's an obvious enough point, but when a colleague suggested that I back it up with some numbers, I couldn't resist. I initially wanted to track all of the nation's top 10 or 15 counties for coal employment over the course of the downturn that began in 2012, but I was thwarted by the BLS's confidentiality rules. If there are so few establishments in an industry in a county that the employment numbers reported in the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages might reveal how many people are working for a particular employer, the BLS suppresses the data. This is a little perverse in the case of coal mines, given that state regulatory agencies and trade groups often publish employment totals for individual mines. But it nonetheless makes for lots of months of missing data for lots of coal counties, so I focused instead on one major coal county for which numbers are readily available for every month since January 2012.

Boone County, population 22,816 (down from 24,629 in 2010), is in southern West Virginia, just south of Charleston. It is named for frontiersman Daniel Boone, who lived from 1788 to 1795 in the nearby Kanawha Valley (he spent a few years before and after that in Kentucky, with which he is more closely identified). It does not have an Arby's.

Coal has been mined in Boone County since at least the 1850s, although the industry really began to take off in the early 1900s. The great majority of the county's coal production long came from underground mines, but in the late 1990s surface mining made big gains, driven by the controversial (even in Boone County) practice known as mountaintop removal. For most of the past quarter-century, Boone County led the state in both coal production and mining employment. First, production: