Sarah Jaffe

I'm five foot four and 130 something pounds.

Like if I have to restrain or lift or like physically interact with somebody who's a lot bigger than me, I'm going to hurt myself.

A guy who's six foot one and has been working down a coal mine.

really, really does bring something else to that work that like, you know, there are reasons to have a big dude do that work sometimes.

But also he really loved it.

And he found it meaningful in a totally different way than the coal mine had been.

But as you said, the conditions still sucked.

You know, he was saying and he was sort of more used to going on strike than a lot of the people that he worked with.

And he had a lot of the women that he worked with because the coal mines were literally all men.

It was illegal for women to work down the mines so that that whole thing, you know, he was like, OK, I'm ready to go on strike.

But a lot of the other people were like, oh, this is really hard for me because, yeah, we don't want to walk away from our patients because they need us.

The boss is the one screwing us over, not our patients.

Exactly.

It was so striking, right, to talk to him and also to talk to Chris Kitchen, who is the head of the union now, you know, and mostly his job because actually they closed down the last coal mine in Britain between when I finished writing this book and when we're talking.

And so there are literally no active members of the National Union of Mine Workers anymore.

There are just retirees and people who have gone into other industries.

And so...

When I talked to Chris Kitchen, you know, so much of his job was

He's either fighting for retiree benefits and health care and things, you know, where they have, you know, lung disease and things like that from going down in coal mines and breathing that air.

And then he's going to commemorations and celebrations because there are a lot of horrible things happened over the years, over the centuries, really, of the British coal mining industry.