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Rural America is facing an existential crisis. As cities continue to grow and prosper, small towns are shrinking. That fundamental divide played itself out in the recent presidential election.
[...] The trend is clear: Rural America is literally fading away. It shouldn't come as a surprise, therefore, that the opioid overdose epidemic has hit rural states, like Kentucky and West Virginia, especially hard. And the latest research from the CDC also shouldn't come as a surprise: Suicides in rural America (labeled as non-core) have increased over 40% in 16 years.
From 1999 to 2015, suicide rates increased everywhere in America. On average, across the U.S., suicides increased from 12.2 per 100,000 to 15.7 per 100,0001, an increase of just under 30%. However, in rural America, the suicide rate surged over 40%2, from just over 15 per 100,000 to roughly 22 per 100,000. Similarly, the suicide rate in micropolitan areas (defined as having a population between 10,000-49,999) went from 14 per 100,000 to 19 per 100,000, an increase of around 35%.
On the flip side, major cities saw much smaller increases in suicide rates, on the order of 10%. The graph depicts a clear pattern: Suicide rates are highest in the most rural parts of the country, and they slowly decrease as urbanization increases. As of 2015, the suicide rate in rural areas (22 per 100,000) is about 40% higher than in the nation as a whole (15.7 per 100,000) and 83% higher than in large cities (12 per 100,000).
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:24PM
There are over five million jobs unfilled at this moment because nobody can be found willing and able to do them.
I've seen you say this before. I'm curious about your source for this info, because honestly I'd like to read more about it.
I completely agree with you that we need to encourage more young people to learn trades, enter apprenticeships instead of college, etc. I have no doubt that many young people could find better employment opportunities in skilled trades. But I am also aware that employment markets can be manipulated and "shortages" can be exaggerated (e.g., employers unwilling to pay reasonable wages for qualified people, unions manipulating entry-level qualifications and apprenticeship opportunities, etc.), so I'm just looking for accurate figures.
Just as one data point, my dad was a skilled tradesman all his life, and a highly qualified one. For the last couple decades of his career, he worked at a non-union shop, mostly because it was closer to home and union opportunities were few in the area. Anyhow, what he saw in his final few years was: (1) his company outsourced more and more work, to the point that the tradesmen in his division of the company decreased by over 75% while he was there, (2) increasing automation also played a role in reducing necessary workforce, and (3) in his final years, his company decided that individual tradesmen weren't really as important, so it wanted to reclassify everyone as "multi-skilled workers." Thus, my dad, in his mid-late 50s, spent a year or so going to night school on and off, taking an 8-week course on basic electrician skills or basic mechanic skills or whatever, to supposedly "train" him to be a "multi-skilled worker."
He did this because the company promised salary increases for "multi-skilled workers" and because he saw previous cutbacks so this created a little more job security for him. He was jumping through the stupid hoops created by management, who clearly were idiots and thought that you could create somebody who could basically do ALL skilled trades just by giving them a few weeks training in each.
My point is that the neglect of skilled trades isn't only an education issue. They are often not appreciated anymore by society, by employers, etc. Unless you hit a particular demand in an area or get a good union job that guarantees high wages, etc., you may not be paid proportionately to the level of skill expected of skilled tradesmen. So it's part of a larger issue too.