The U.S Department of Labor has awarded Wyoming a National Dislocated Worker Grant of $2 million to assist coal workers who have been recently laid off. .
Workers laid off in Campbell, Converse, Crook, Johnson, Niobrara, Sheridan and Weston counties will be able to receive the funds. Applications are available online for those who are eligible. Each worker can get up to $6,500 which can be used for retraining in a new field.
“We had this big meeting and they said there was retraining available for whatever you wanted to go into,” Kelly Reyes, formery employed in the coal industry, said, “I didn’t know that it was still an option,”
Reyes was employed at Arch Coal’s Black Thunder mine for over two years before getting laid off in April 2016. A year later, she is currently working as a truck driver for Turf Master in Colorado and Wyoming. Reyes was able to find work after losing her job, however, others have not.
“It hasn’t been easy for [others] to find work,” Reyes said. “ One worker, she was out at the mines for more than ten years and she moved out of state to find work.”
Within the last two years, Wyoming mines have laid off over 30 percent of employees. According to Insider Energy, Peabody Energy and Arch Coal both laid off 15 percent of their employees in 2016. Together, the country’s two largest mines cut about 500 workers in total last year.
The grant initially released $1,080,465 and has helped 140 workers so far.
“I was never contacted,” Reyes said. “I got severance pay and that was that, life went on,” Reyes said.
Between the 235 workers at Peabody’s mine in North Antelope Rochelle and the 230 at Arch’s Black Thunder mine that were laid off last year, Reyes said she hasn’t heard anything about the $6,500 grant.
“Typically this kind of stuff hits the social media where people [say], ‘hey I’m not working at the mine anymore, guess what I’m doing, and Wyoming pays for it,’” Reyes said. “I never saw any of it.”
Resources are currently available at the Department of Workforce Services and an application is provided online for anyone eligible to receive the grant.
Reyes said she would have looked into retraining if the workforce would have contacted her directly and told her about the grant.
“If they were truly going to help retrain us I would have received all kinds of stuff from the workforce but I never received anything,” Reyes said.
She said she would consider applying if the grant is going to be effective in retraining her.
“I never really wanted to drive trucks all my life,” Reyes said. “The income that we had coming off that mine, a single parent could have easily supported a family on, and to have to come back to what I was doing before, we struggled. To be able to be retrained and gamefully employed in the same income bracket would have been helpful.”
