For the five Americans who still live in rural areas, remote work is not a luxury, this is a rescue line. And more and more of these possible workers will be at risk unless we can summon the collective will to provide distant work opportunities.
Now here is the good news: the majority in the rural regions are ready to take advantage of these opportunities – provided we find innovative ways to give them a chance.
This is the emergence of fresh research, which the generation, the non -profit purpose I am leading, has recently been ordered. We entered the field, knowing that average and older workers everywhere-although they are a growing part of the workforce-more likely to fight long-term unemployment. And knowing that long-term, constant poverty is much more common in rural counties than urban cities.
To learn more about this particularly contested subset, we have partnered with Yougov to explore more than 500 people aged 45 or more years that reside in rural areas in 17 states that make up the Apalachia and Delta regions. Almost half of them were currently unemployed.
We started, confirming what we suspected: many of these people hurt. House repair, health emergency situation, problems with the car: such very likely grants are disasters that are waiting to happen. Sixty -one percent of the persons aged 45+, who we have interviewed, say they will not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $ 1,000. In fact, 37% don’t have enough money to meet their daily needs, and another 32% just make the edges meet. Only one every four years says he can meet his needs and save on the future. Unemployment when struck is a deep hole to get into. And 45% of the unemployed in our study has been unemployed for more than two years.
It was neither surprising to find that from supply local economies simply did not create enough jobs. More eye removal was the way in which constant uncertainty formed our respondents’ expectations for what a good job is. Asked to define “high quality work”, their answers had nothing to do with the necessary levels of education or technical skills. Instead, they focused on three basic things: competitive salaries, predictable full -time hours and stable employment. Using these basic criteria as their definition, only 6% told us that the area in which they live supported “many” such high quality jobs, while 35% said there was “little or none”.
It was when we started researching for solutions that things got really interesting. One possible option-waiting for large parts of unemployed or inoperative rural
The workers should move to the place where the good jobs are-have done non-standard. Only 24% in our study believe that moving a “somewhat likely” option, while only 8% say it will be “very likely” to move if a better opportunity arises. This inertia reflects a powerful combination of uncertainty about the potential financial burdens that the move leads and security for the high emotional costs of abandoning deep relationships with families and the community. This is in line with a broader drop in geographical mobility in the United States, which is said to have affected the latest studies of the Brokenges institution “historically low.”
Then there is a jump in direct investment in rural America, what is left? Only one option: extending remote work opportunities. Among the many factors that each company should take into account before making such an investment, we focused on a key variable, the desire of the local workforce to try something new. Here, too, the results of our study offered a great surprise.
Moreover, although 71% of all respondents have not been involved in official training or skill development training in the last three years, 50% have told us that they are interested or are very interested in learning new skills for their career progress. Moreover, 75% – they say they would take courses or learn new skills to be more competitive for remote work opportunities.
Extracting these opportunities will not be easy. Even after the companies are convinced of the business case, they will still have to improve their ability and that of their providers and partners to create online training programs that are profitable, which convey coherent identification data and which are obviously relevant to the provision of jobs-all issues that our respondents define as critical. All future public funds invested in training will also have to deal with these problems.
Still, here’s at least a deeply rooted social problem that does not require a big new policy program to meet it. Rural intermediate and older workers have confirmed our survey, are ready and ready to gain the necessary skills if and when the opportunity appears.
At the moment, however, the reverse response to remote work is a decline in similar jobs. As a first step, we need to expand our current debate about the pros and cons of remote work and look at the impact on corporate culture, productivity and well -being of employees. Yes, the management of these compromises is complicated. But this is also a great concern for the city.
For rural Americans, betting on winning ways to expand remote work is related to something far more fundamental – access to today’s labor market, which otherwise seems to be leaving them even more in the enclosure.
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