Mid Week At Work. 700 out of work in Gillette

Last Saturday I went to a funeral.

I'll not give the details on it, but one of the things was that before it, there was, as there often is now, a slideshow with photographs of the departed's life, which in this case was certainly highly poignant.  That was done to background music, as is also seemingly the norm now.

One of those songs was James McMurtry's Lights of Cheyenne.

I'm not sure how McMurtry is categorized musically.  I wouldn't classify him as "Country" music, now that I'm slightly familiar with him, as he seems to me to be more of a sort of folk balladeer.  Not a cheesy neo folk balladeer,  like Bob Dylan (sorry Dylan fans, but that's how he strikes me), but more of the genuine article like John Prine.

McMurtry is the son of novelist Larry McMurtry whose novels are concentrated on rural, and often historical, Texas.  Larry McMurtry wrote what I'd regard as by far the most accurate novel on the atmosphere of modern ranching, Horseman, Pass By, which was made into the very good, but not as good as the book, movie Hud.  Some of those descriptive abilities clearly passed on to his son, as they're in Lights of Cheyenne.

Okay, what's this have to do with Gillette and the coal layoffs?  Quite a lot.

Lights of Cheyenne does a really good job of describing the lives of dozens, maybe hundreds, of people from this region I've met in lawsuits and in the law in general, both plaintiff's and defendants.  I can't quite describe it, but he does in the song.



I should note that when people post such things, the first question is "are you referring to yourself?".

Nope.

Not at all in fact.  But rather the people I've met on both sides of litigation.

And frankly a lot of those same people are now out of work in Gillette.

The Houston Chronicle published an article sometime ago trying to describe the reason that Donald Trump won the presidency, and did it by saying that those people were described in the music of James McMurtry.  If you wanted to understand them, it maintained, listen to McMurtry.

That's too simplistic and definitely not fully accurate, but there's something to it.

I haven't written about coal for awhile, although there are quite a few items up on this blog about coal and trends applying to it.  What surprised me over the last year or so is that coal seemed to stabilize.  Then it became clear that it had not.  It was still in trouble, but it did look for awhile as if the coal companies might be able to hold on and work their way out of their immediate financial difficulties.  Then this came, so apparently not.  At least it doesn't look that way.  Seven hundred benign laid off at once is a pretty big message.

Where from here?  Well nobody knows.  But even on a day in which the Tribune leads its headlines with the disaster, in the help wanted a coal mine in Sweetwater County is hiring.  So some will make it back into coal jobs.  Chances are that these mines won't be closed forever either.

But the trend line is pretty hard to ignore.  People who were counting on a change in administration to reverse coal's fortunes must be disappointed and there's no way to realistically related this back to any prior era.  It's the era itself.  Half of Wyoming's coal production has disappeared over the past decade and a lot of jobs with that.  Now more are gone and a lot of them won't be coming back.