Americans who live in rural areas don’t believe good jobs are coming and they don’t want to move. We have to bring remote work to the country
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
Americans who live in rural areas don’t believe good jobs are coming and they don’t want to move. We have to bring remote work to the country
Posted by Sine_Fine_Belli
21 Comments
We need remote manufacturing!
Ok then be poor. No one is coming to save you from yourselves.
> don’t believe good jobs are coming in
> won’t move
Be fucking poor then I guess? It’s so fucking entitled to live in the middle of nowhere, but demand good services and also demand high paying jobs. They won’t accept government help because they’re “independent” but they also want to be pampered and spoiled with good jobs for no economically sound reason.
A literal apocalyptic event couldn’t make remote working a permanent thing, if COVID couldn’t do it I don’t think anything can, people still want to live in cities.
I wonder how much of this debate hinges on just denial about the preferences of where people want to live.
In medicine, not only are there jobs, but they pay considerably higher for going rural than staying in the cities (even if smaller cities). But still most people rather not move to the middle of nowhere.
I myself am one of them – I wouldn’t wanna live rural long term ; even with higher pay/job security.
I doubt it’s much different for people working remote jobs whose pay is most often agnostic to where they live and who can realistically enjoy amenities in their free time way more than an ER worker who works high hours, even if on call.
Ah yes coddle red areas more!
Awww. But you’re land rich! Eat dirt 🙂
Aren’t the majority of remote jobs white collar? Yet, it seems like this article is talking about blue-collar work
The stats cited in this article seem to me to be more of an argument for YIMBY than for expanding remote work. People can’t find good jobs in rural areas but are also afraid to move to cities because of high cost of living (valid). It seems like the best solution would be to build more housing in these high demand areas and reduce rents.
Tangential note: I’ve worked full remote for years and I’ve definitely thought about moving to a rural area to save money. But tbh I’m not sure it would be worth it unless I had friends who wanted to do it with me (almost all my friends work in-person/hybrid and I doubt they’d uproot their lives regardless) or if the city had a thriving youth population already. I’m also a minority so it probably wouldn’t be great for me
I mean you can want all the highly skilled remote work to go to rural America, where I grew up, but most people don’t want to live in a town with two restaurants and 8 churches.
On the other hand, people in my hometown aren’t miserable. It’s cheap as shit to live there and the schools are decent. Yes farming has been hollowed out and there are less factories. But it keeps going and the people there don’t want to change their towns.
These types of initiatives/plans/whatever always reek of CEOs being like, how can I get people who would scream at joy to be paid 20 bucks an hour to replace my urban employees who need 30 to scrape by?
If we are strictly speaking about entry level remote work that anyone can do, I don’t there’s going to be enough of that to go around in the near future.
https://preview.redd.it/hn10pduipuhf1.jpeg?width=349&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aa67e89a6476c94ee3786a777472eedc453d4e9f
“We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Fuck em
Well the good news is they’re also voting for policies that won’t make any of that better
Former rural poor here. When it was pretty clear I had no future at home I got out and now have a great job in a city. What the hell is so complicated. Stop being babies. I have zero tolerance for this and I don’t buy the Chris Arnade argument that this is about roots and legacy and heritage etc. All professional victims.
I live in a rural area and I want to move. The problem is that no one will hire me in the cities. I want to have a job lined up before I move. But, it seems the moment they see I’m not from the city, they turn me down.
Do they think they’ll be the ones getting these remote jobs?
I think it is less about them being underemployed and more about them being unemployable. You have to know how to do something to work remotely and shooting guns and complaining about minorities isn’t going to cut it.
womp womp
Part of the reason they hate immigrants. Seeing people who have the wherewithal to uproot themselves, find their way to a whole another country, start life over from zero and manage to find themselves economically while all they can muster is “woes me, my mine closed” has to breed jealousy and resentment.
> And here our survey results offered a big upside surprise.
> Specifically, even though 71% of all respondents have not participated in any formal job training or skills development programs in the last three years, 50% told us they are interested or very interested in learning new skills to advance their careers. Even more – 75% – say they would take courses or learn new skills to make themselves more competitive for remote work opportunities.
Uh…. author, *this is not good news*. If they do not have the skills **today**, they are essentially fucked. Remote work is not particularly great for entry-level employees because they need to be trained. It’s *very* effective for experienced employees. So how are these people without the skills going to get the most competitive jobs in the market?
I’m very supportive of expanding remote work. It really is a win/win situation in a lot of cases. But this is not going to be some sort of gift to rural communities. If you want competitive wages, you kinda need to be…. *competitive*. And waiting for an opportunity to present itself just ain’t that.
>And more and more of these would-be workers will be at risk unless we can summon the collective will to make remote job opportunities available to them.
Who is this “we?”
>Now here’s the good news: A majority in rural regions are ready to seize these opportunities—provided we find innovative ways to give them a chance.
Ready to seize the opportunities that don’t exist? So you mean, not ready to do anything until someone drops a job in their lap?
>long-term, persistent poverty is far more prevalent in rural counties than urban counties.
Yeah, jobs tend to cluster where there are more people and rural areas tend not to have many people.
>Nor was it surprising to find that on the supply side, local economies simply aren’t creating enough jobs
Supply side economics failing, in THIS country? Say it ain’t so! Oh and which political party do rural folks tend to prefer? I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader.
>Specifically, even though 71% of all respondents have not participated in any formal job training or skills development … 75% – say they would take courses or learn new skills to make themselves more competitive for remote work opportunities
So they’re doing jack shit.
Rural areas losing out on jobs is a GLOBAL thing. It’s not specific to the US. Companies aren’t going to make remote jobs just to give them to rural folks, might as well send the job overseas for a 66% salary cut.
Boy global economics sure is complicated.
Is their internet good enough?