Last June I drove to Homer City, Pennsylvania, to talk to Aric Baker, the head of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 459. The Homer City Generating Station, Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant, was set to close before the July 4 holiday. One hundred of his union members would soon be out of work; the indirect costs of the closure would be larger. Homer City, a small town in western Pennsylvania already struggling since the closure of surrounding coal mines decades earlier, would suffer another blow.
Although the Inflation Reduction Action (IRA) was passed a year earlier and incentivized investments in “energy communities” like Homer City, the promise of future green investments was little consolation to union workers who needed a new job in two weeks. The IRA had no direct assistance to workers displaced by the energy transition, leaving Local 459 members to search for other jobs or take unemployment. With few comparable jobs in the region, many left the state altogether. As for green energy, Baker observed that the solar plant down the road was advertising $15 per hour wages at the local job fair. His members made at least $100,000 a year.
The union leader was angry and conflicted: he saw that Republicans were anti-union and that Donald Trump’s promise to “dig more coal” had not panned out. He understood that coal was being undermined by natural gas and “wasn’t the fuel of the future.” But he also felt deserted by Democrats, who appeared to have little consideration for the workers who had spent decades working night shifts and weekends to keep the lights on for the rest of America. “Energy workers,” he told me, “are politically homeless.”
Trump’s resounding victory this month…
Auteur: Michael Levien
