Essays From West of 98: What is a Good Job? Part 1
Last week, I kicked off a series of essays about job creation. Specifically, I want to talk about creating “good jobs” in our rural communities. What is a “good job,” anyway? If I asked you to describe the essential qualities, what would they be? We might all give slightly different answers, because each of us have different priorities, but I’m guessing our responses would all include some variation of the following: good compensation, additional benefits like insurance and retirement, job security, and opportunities to advance.
In recent years, our country has conducted inordinate amounts of research and spilled untold amounts of ink on the topic of changing trends in the workforce, so that employers, government researchers, and the media can “understand” younger generations. I bring this up for a reason: if we are going to provide “good jobs” in rural America, it behooves us to know who will be filling those jobs and what matters most to them. If a community is seeking jobs in 2020 the same way it was in 1975, without factoring in the changing world or different generations, well, good luck to you.
I have read countless articles about younger generations in the workforce. Some of the writing is insightful. Much of it is utterly useless. The term “millennial” is often media shorthand for “people younger than me that I don’t understand.” The reality is that I am a millennial. I am 37 years old, young by some metrics, but hardly a teenager as some of these “millennial” articles imply. The youngest millennials are closer to 30 than they are to 20. Millennials comprise well over a third of the American workforce, a share that stands to grow as more baby boomers phase into retirement. Millennials are raising kids who attend our schools. Millennials are paying local property taxes and are often already community leaders. If a rural community is not considering the millennial workforce, then they are ceding the opportunity to grow a vital population.
Beyond the useless millennial articles, I have read a lot of intelligent research on career preferences among varying generations. The results are striking. There is an idea that the average American worker changes jobs more frequently today than in the past. The reality is more mixed. Anecdotally, fewer people stay in one job for 40 years now than in, say, 1960, but there are also fewer of those “long haul” jobs available today than in 1960. Did you know that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median American spends about 4-1/2 years at a job today? This is actually slightly longer than in the 1980s.
Did you know that when “millennials” are surveyed about their priorities in a career, the answers are roughly similar to those of prior generations? To be sure, there are some differences between generations (particularly in interpersonal dynamics), but when you look at the big picture, whether the employees are 25, 35, or 55, they want to make a good living. They want to be valued by their employer and treated decently. They want to feel like they are making a difference in the world.
That brings me back to “good jobs” in rural communities. There has been a prevailing view for many decades that rural America needs to send its youth off to the city to find a good job. This migration exploded after World War II, when the children of farm and ranch communities left for the city to find a job, often at a factory.
I’m running short on room today, so we will continue this next week. The postwar migration has not stopped, even if “city jobs” look very different in 2021 than they did after World War II. Why is that? And how do we reverse the migration back to good jobs in small towns? And what sort of jobs are attractive to today’s workforce?
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.