For the one in five Americans who still live in rural areas, remote work isn’t a luxury, it’s a lifeline. 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.
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.
That’s the upshot of fresh research that Generation, the non-profit I run, recently commissioned. We went into the field knowing that midcareer and older workers everywhere – though they are a growing portion of the labor force – are more likely to struggle with long-term unemployment. And knowing also that long-term, persistent poverty is far more prevalent in rural counties than urban counties.
To learn more about this especially challenged subset, we partnered with YouGov to survey more than 500 individuals aged 45 or older who reside in rural areas across 17 states that make up the Appalachia and Delta regions. Almost half were currently unemployed.
We started by confirming what we suspected: Many of these folks are hurting. A house repair, a health emergency, car trouble: such all-too-likely unbudgeted costs are disasters waiting to happen. Sixty-one percent of the individuals aged 45+ whom we surveyed say they would not be able to cover an unexpected expense of $1,000. In fact, 37% do not have enough money to cover their daily needs, and another 32% are just making ends meet. Only one in four say they can meet their needs and save for the future. Unemployment, when it strikes, is a deep hole to fall into. And 45% of the unemployed in our survey have been out of work for more than two years.
Nor was it surprising to find that on the supply side, local economies simply aren’t creating enough jobs. More eye-opening was the way persistent precarity has shaped our respondents’ expectation of what constitutes a good job. Asked to define a “high-quality job,” their answers had nothing to do with the levels of education or technical skills required. Instead, they focused on three essentials: competitive wages, predictable full-time hours and steady employment. Using those basic criteria as their definition, only 6% told us that the area they live in supports “many” such high-quality jobs, while 35% said there are “few or none.”
It was when we began probing for solutions that things got really interesting. One possible option—expecting large swathes of unemployed or under-employed rural
workers to move to where the good jobs are—proved a non-starter. Only 24% in our survey consider relocation a “somewhat likely” option, while just 8% say they would be “very likely” to relocate if a better opportunity came along. That inertia reflects a powerful mix of uncertainty about the potential financial burdens a move entails and certainty about the high emotional cost of abandoning deep ties to families and community. It’s consistent with a broader decline in geographic mobility in the U.S., which recent Brookings Institution research says has hit “historic lows.”
Barring a surge in direct investment in rural America, then, what remains? Just one option: Expanding remote work opportunities. Among the multiple factors that any company would need to consider before making such an investment, we focused on one key variable, the willingness of the local workforce to try something new. 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.
Seizing those opportunities won’t be easy. Even after companies convince themselves of the business case, they will still need to hone their ability and that of their vendors and partners to create online training programs that are cost-effective, that convey agreed-upon credentials, and that are clearly relevant to securing jobs—all issues that our respondents identified as critical. Any future public funds invested in training will also need to address these concerns.
Still, here’s at least one deeply rooted social problem that doesn’t require a grand new policy program to meet it. Rural midcareer and older workers, our survey confirmed, are ready and willing to gain the skills needed, if and when the opportunity appears.
At the moment, though, the backlash against remote work is spurring a decline in such jobs. As a first step we need to broaden our current debate about the pros and cons of remote work and look beyond the impact on corporate culture, productivity and employee well-being. Yes, managing those trade-offs is complex. But it’s also largely a big city concern.
For rural Americans, the stakes in finding profitable ways to expand remote work are about something far more fundamental—access to today’s job market that otherwise seems sure to leave them even further in the lurch.
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