If there is one thing the workers can't stand, it is occasionally getting paid to go fishing or crack open a cold one and grill outdoors.
reject any offer of retraining and definitely didn’t want to learn to code.
Because the idea of having 30-40 year old blue-collar men from Appalachia being asked to suddenly learn how to deeply and intimately use a computer while learning an entirely new language form is about the same as expecting them to learn Chinese and be foreign exchange traders. Retraining would make sense in other similar fields. Other forms of mining/extraction or another blue-collar trade.
On top of that, what would be the point in training them in code? So they can have their skill-set entirely useless in 2-3 years when AI starts doing the jobs for them?