A comparison which doesn't lessen the pain for those 50,000 mostly well-paid people in any regard what-so-ever.
Those jobs are often not easy to replace financially for the people working them. It involves uprooting their families, or being away for weeks at a time, working in the natural gas industry or similar, and they still don't make more than they were making in coal. I grew up around coal country Appalachia. Making $50,000 per year in a coal mine in the early 1990s, anywhere in Appalachia, was a financial godsend for those workers. I knew a lot of families that it provided a solid middle class life for, people that otherwise were going to be stuck working low wage jobs in those regions, if there were any jobs at all (and it was a hard, dirty, unhealthy, dangerous job; they all knew that).
A typical Sears worker has plenty of other opportunities at comparable or higher pay. There isn't a shortage of $13-$15 / hour jobs in the US, particularly in the locations where most Sears stores operated historically.
We should be putting those workers to work as part of the NPS/US Forest Service in Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains as these extraction jobs phase out. Better to focus on conservation and remediation instead of extraction IMHO (and the cost to employee someone in such a role is not much higher per person, ~$65k/year, than they'd receive at max social security benefits [~$35k/year]).
Better yet, put them to work reclaiming mine sites where possible. Rape is not too strong a word to describe mountain top removal. I don't even care if it comes out of my taxpayer dollars instead of the pockets of the coal operators who need to be held responsible, I just want it done. It has to be done, there are places in West Virginia that have been on boiled water warnings long before Flint. And so much of Appalachian culture is having deep ties to the land, so it'd be very meaningful work in the same way being an nth generation coal miner is meaningful work, regardless of how misguided that seems to outsiders.
Interesting idea. What does reclaiming a mine site achieve practically? Any chance an abandoned mine could be repurposed as a datacenter, solar panels lining what used to be a mountain top?
Not all coal mining happens in Appalachia (this specific company mines in Wyoming and Montana). Is it unreasonable to expect it straightforward to transition workers from an industry that employs less people than Arby's (the fast food establishment) into other roles?
