“We understand what's going on and, yes, we want to be a part of the solution,” she said. “Secretary Kerry trying to equate the job of an electrician in a coal mine who makes $110,000 to a solar tech, who might make $35,000 to $40,000, is not a good analogy for our state. Honestly, I think most people who look at that and look at him, in particular, making that statement see a certain arrogance about it.”
There’s broad consensus on the need to diversify the state’s economy and further develop sectors like tourism and recreation, mine reclamation, agriculture, renewable energy and higher education in hopes of reversing a steady population decline and attracting young people back to the state. Multiple people said major federal investments in critical areas like broadband could help make the state turn the corner in attracting new residents.
“It’s going to take large scale federal investment. We need a New Deal-type reinvestment strategy to turn this thing around here,” said Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, a state affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation.
Manchin will play a key role in whatever support for the state emerges. He has likened coal miners to “returning Vietnam vets” who have been disrespected by the country that relied on their work for generations to power its growth and said they need an opportunity to do something different.
“For them to be chastised the way they have been and attacked unmercifully and trying to attack their way of life [is wrong]. There’s a transition. If there’s a transition, fine, we understand that,” he said in a previously unreported 2019 interview with POLITICO. “They expect to be treated fairly and [given] an opportunity.”
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Fairness is where workers, especially those involved in organized labor, find fault with Democrats’ green economic makeover.
Some clean-energy companies lack the most basic of labor protections. Many categorize their workforce as contractors, denying them full benefits. Very few wind and solar companies have unions, and many opposed unionization efforts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has taken a particularly strong stance against unions, with the National Labor Relations Board demanding he remove a tweet that allegedly threatened organizers. (Tesla appealed the ruling in March.) And making electric vehicles requires fewer parts than internal combustion engine-powered cars, translating to fewer workers.
“There's members saying, ‘If we're moving into this, if we're transitioning into all these new jobs, where's mine?’ So outline specifically how the transition will be laid out,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer with the AFL-CIO. “Is it going to be a bridge for those who are close to retirement? Is it going to be wage replacement? Is it going to be help training up folks into the next opportunity?”
And while solar installer and wind turbine technician jobs may be growing, there’s still fewer of them than in competing energy fields and they’re not necessarily in the same locations as displaced fossil-fuel workers.
“These are the jobs you're going to have, but nobody can really tell us what they are,” said Jeff Nobers, executive director of the Builders Guild of Western Pennsylvania. “And then some other obvious questions. Will people have to move? Do I have to relocate my family?”
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Democrats contend it’s more than just solar and wind, saying they can restore hollowed-out industrial towns with manufacturing industries of the future. Manchin and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) floated an $8 billion advanced manufacturing tax credit that would send half that total to census tracts where coal mines and power plants have shuttered, in an attempt to inject new life into vulnerable towns.
But that doesn’t mean the local workforce is ready to take on those jobs, Nobers said. The skills learned in one area are less transferable than policymakers imagine, he said. Smith, the UMWA spokesman, said that many clean-energy jobs are “at the margins,” and tend to disappear once the solar panels and wind turbines are up and running. And the billions Biden called for to pay people to reclaim abandoned wells and mines would be fleeting, too, he said.
“There's never been such a thing as a just transition,” Smith said. “Now, at least people are talking about the need for it, which is which is a step in the right direction. But there's been no example in this country of how to do that.”
The Biden administration is looking to the Energy Department to lead its jobs effort. The department led an interagency effort to identify proposals to revitalize coal communities, which produced a not-yet-publicized report that includes a list of communities ripe for reinvigoration.The department also has stood up a new energy jobs office led by Jennifer Kropke, a longtime International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers member, that is communicating regularly with organized labor.
Still, labor leaders insist that much of the administration’s and Democrats’ plans amount to tinkering around the edges of the real problem. They pointed to efforts to impose prevailing wage requirements to ensure fair pay on federal clean-energy projects, to boost training programs, to diversify local economies. But truly transforming the landscape and making clean energy work for labor, union leaders said, would require changing federal labor laws to make it easier to organize — an effort that would be highly unlikely to prevail in the 50-50 Senate without Republican support. Organizers contend that without passing legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, the U.S. clean energy manufacturing renaissance Biden envisions would be free to engage in a race to the bottom for wages and benefits.