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The collapse of traditional work in Appalachia has definitely created a lot of social problems, and also political backlash – although very much with the wrong targets. But I have a couple of thoughts 1/ nytimes.com/2019/03/15/opi…
One is that something similar happened to blue-collar work in big US cities, leading to social collapse in some urban communities – but strange to say, all the emphasis was on the supposed problems of black culture, not the disappearance of work 2/ 
The second is that the collapse of mining employment happened a long time ago – and while the region is depressed, there have been other forms of employment, What stops these jobs from being seen as providing work with dignity? (Serious question) 3/
Part of the point may be that new forms of work pay badly, not because they must, but because workers were denied bargaining power. In other words, it's not really about coal, it's about politics 4/
