For one in five Americans who still live in rural areas, remote work is not a luxury, but a lifeline. Unless we can have a collective willingness to call out remote work opportunities, more and more likely workers will be at risk.
Now, here is good news: most people in rural areas are ready to take these opportunities – we offer innovative ways to give them opportunities.
This is the result of a new generation of research on the nonprofit I recently run. We entered the field and knew that intermediate and older workers everywhere (although they are increasingly labor-powered) were more likely to struggle with long-term unemployment. Moreover, it is also known that long-term, persistent poverty is more common in rural counties than in urban counties.
To learn more about this particular challenge subset, we worked with YouGov to survey more than 500 people over 45 who live in rural areas of the 17 states that make up the Appalachian and Delta regions. Almost half of them are unemployed at present.
We first need to confirm our suspicion: many of them are hurt. House repair, health emergency, car trouble: such obvious loophole costs are waiting for disasters. 61% of individuals over 45 who were surveyed said they would not be able to pay $1,000 in surprise fees. In fact, 37% don’t have enough money to meet their daily needs, and another 32% just make ends meet. Only one in four people say they can meet their needs and save on the future. Unemployment, when attacked, is a hole in trouble. 45% of the unemployed people in our survey have been unemployed for more than two years.
It is not surprising that local economies simply don’t create enough jobs when it comes to supply. The continued durability makes our respondents’ expectations of posing a good job even more eye-opening. Asked to define “quality work”, their answers have nothing to do with the level of education or technical skills required. Instead, they focus on three basic elements: competitive wages, predictable full-time hours and stable employment. By these basic criteria, only 6% tell us that the area they live in is “many” of such high-quality jobs, while 35% say “few or no”.
It was when we started exploring solutions that things became very interesting. A possible option – counting on a large number of unemployment or employment in rural areas
Workers can move to a place where good jobs are – a non-starter. In our survey, only 24% believed that relocation was a “some possible” option, while only 8% said that if there were a better chance, they would “very likely” to move. This inertia reflects strong uncertainty about the underlying financial burden, as well as certainty about the high emotional cost of abandoning deep connections with families and communities. This is in line with the recent Brookings Institution Research in the United States that it has hit a “historic low”, which is consistent with a larger decline in geographic liquidity in the United States.
Unless direct investment in rural America surges, what remains? There is only one option: expand remote work opportunities. Among the many factors that any company needs to consider before making such investments, we focus on one key variable, the willingness of the local workforce to try something new. Here, our survey results bring great surprises.
Specifically, even though 71% of respondents in the past three years have not participated in any formal job training or skill development programs, 50% have told us that they are interested or very interested in learning new skills to promote careers. Even 75% say they will take courses or learn new skills to make themselves more competitive in remote work opportunities.
It is not easy to seize these opportunities. Even if companies convinced their own business cases, they still need to hone their abilities as well as the capabilities of suppliers and partners to create cost-effective online training programs that convey consistent certificates and are clearly relevant to ensuring work – all respondents identified as key. Any public funding invested in training in the future will also need to address these issues.
Nevertheless, at least it is a deeply rooted social problem and does not require a grand new policy plan to satisfy it. Our survey confirms that mid-sized rural workers and older workers are ready and willing to acquire the skills they need if there is a chance to show up.
However, strong opposition to remote work is currently driving such work to decline. As a first step, we need to expand the current debate on the pros and cons of remote working and beyond the impact on corporate culture, productivity and employee well-being. Yes, managing these tradeoffs is complicated. But this is also a big city’s focus.
For rural Americans, finding profitable ways to expand their stakes in remote work is a more basic thing – visiting today’s job markets that would otherwise seem to have certainly put them in a further woes.
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