U.S. Department of Labor data show that the majority of agricultural laborers whose legal rights have been violated are farmworkers in the U.S. on H-2A visas.

These workers make up about 11% of the overall agricultural workforce, according to the Woodrow Wilson Center, but an Investigate Midwest analysis found that they were owed 62% of the industry’s back wages in 2022. This represents a dramatic increase over the past 15 years. In 2008, by comparison, H-2A workers were owed 30% of the industry’s back wages.

Employers who are found to have violated labor laws may be subject to civil monetary penalties — punitive fines that are paid to the government rather than to the affected employees. Not all cases that find illegal wage withholding result in such fines, and employers may instead be ordered to pay workers withheld wages without additional penalties.

Farmers do not always directly employ H-2A laborers and may instead work with farm labor contractors, who recruit workers for placement on individual farms. Farm labor contractors have been fined the most money for H-2A labor violations from 2008 to the present.

The H-2A visa program, established in 1986, provides a legal pathway for migrant workers to perform seasonal work on American farms. The number of H-2A visa certifications has increased rapidly in recent years, more than tripling since 2008.

The Department of Labor lists agriculture as a “low wage, high violation” industry. In 2022, the average rate of hourly pay advertised in H-2A job postings was roughly $14 and workweeks averaged 43 hours. Agricultural employees, regardless of citizenship status, are ineligible for overtime pay due to an exemption in the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The post Back wages owed to H-2A workers have doubled in the last 15 years appeared first on Investigate Midwest.

Rail-safety bills that Congress is considering in response to this year’s catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, need a guarantee that rural communities will get the help they need to deal with their increased risk for derailments, a policy expert says.

“If you look at the history of these catastrophic derailments, they’re overwhelmingly happening in rural places and in small towns across the country,” said Anne Junod, senior research associate at the nonpartisan think tank the Urban Institute, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. Her research informed the railway safety legislation being considered in the Senate.

Last week the National Transportation Safety Board held a hearing near the site of February’s East Palestine, Ohio, derailment, which resulted toxic-chemical fires that lasted two days and forced evacuations. Also last week, liquid asphalt leaked into the Yellowstone River in Montana after a train derailment and railroad bridge collapse over the river.

Rural train derailments incur the highest average damage costs, at just over $362,000 per derailment, according to a Daily Yonder analysis. This is compared to an average of $115,000 in major metropolitan areas and about $200,000 in medium-sized metropolitan areas.

Despite the likelihood and severity of rural train derailments, rural communities are less equipped than cities to adequately respond, according to Junod. This is because rail companies are not required to provide information about the contents of a derailed train to the community affected, leaving that outreach up to local officials. 

“Right now, it's on the community to get a hold of the railroad, and say, ‘what was the material that is now on fire in our community?’” Junod said. “The different types of hazardous materials will dictate the way that you respond and try to control the fire or prevent an explosion.” 

For rural areas where emergency response programs are often volunteer-led and more limited in capacity, conducting this outreach can be difficult when they’re already “punching well above their weight” to adequately respond to a disaster, Junod said. 

This was the case in rural East Palestine, Ohio, where a train carrying chemicals used to make plastic derailed and spilled into the local waterways. Residents within a mile of the crash were under a temporary evacuation order in case of an explosion. 

Reporting from CNN found that most of the firefighters who responded to the disaster were volunteers and did not have the necessary equipment to safely deal with a hazardous chemical spill. 

Nor did they know exactly what they were responding to: While the public was alerted of a vinyl chloride spill immediately after the derailment, Norfolk Southern, the train’s operator, did not disclose what the other hazardous chemicals spilled were until a week later when the company submitted a remedial action work plan to the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. 

And not all affected agencies and jurisdictions were made aware of the derailment. In a letter to the president of Norfolk Southern, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro wrote that the company failed to implement Unified Command, a multi-agency or multi-jurisdictional process that involves coordinated response from agencies and organizations that service the areas affected by a disaster. 

Norfolk Southern decided to burn five of the derailed train cars containing vinyl chloride to avoid an uncontrolled explosion but did not consult Pennsylvania officials before making this decision (East Palestine is just one mile from the Pennsylvania border). 

“Failure to adhere to well-accepted standards of practice related to incident management and prioritizing an accelerated and arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line injected unnecessary risk and created confusion in the [remediation] process,” Governor Shapiro wrote.

Rail Safety Legislation Is Underway

On June 21, 2023, the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced a proposed rule that would require railroads to maintain information about hazardous material shipments. The database would be accessible to authorized emergency response personnel.

All emergency responders authorized, licensed, or otherwise permitted by a state to conduct emergency response activities in their community would have access to the hazardous materials information in the event of a rail accident, according to an agency spokesperson. This means a rural volunteer fire department, for example, would have access as long as they are permitted by the town, county, or state to conduct emergency response operations.

The proposed rule adds to other railway safety legislation already under consideration in Congress in the wake of the East Palestine derailment. 

The RAIL Act, introduced in the House by Ohio Representative Bill Johnson on March 17, would require hotbox detectors be placed every 10 miles on railways used to transport hazardous materials. These detectors monitor how hot a train’s wheels are, which when overheated, can cause breakage and result in a derailed train, as was the case in East Palestine. The legislation would also provide grant funding for hazardous material training for first responders. 

The Railway Safety Act of 2023, introduced in the Senate by Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown on March 1, would also require wayside defect detectors – a monitoring system on railroad tracks that includes hotbox detectors – be used for every train carrying hazardous materials. Railway companies would be required to provide state emergency response commissioners with advance notice about what hazardous materials are moving through their communities. 

While the bills are a good starting point, said Junod from the Urban Institute, they don’t go far enough to meet rural communities where they are. The federal funding from these bills would likely be disseminated through grants, which can be a barrier for rural communities who don’t have paid staff to apply for these grants. 

“If [these bills] don't have a kind of rural guarantee, they're gonna face further challenges in accessing these really needed resources,” Junod said. 

The post Railway Safety Bills Need to Ensure Rural Areas Get Help, Experts Say appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

For those who have been wondering about what was going on north of the Hollister Municipal Airport with all the blue tarps and 9,000 pilings driven 50 feet into the ground that will eventually support a 1-million-square-foot fulfillment facility, the wait is over.

Today, Amazon answered BenitoLink’s repeated requests to verify that the new building will be its latest venture in San Benito County. BenitoLink also requested the former city manager Brett Miller to reveal the tenant of the fulfillment center but never responded. A planning department staff member recently told this reporter the city was under a nondisclosure agreement for that project.

“We’re looking forward to opening a new facility in the city of Hollister, which has been a great partner on this project from the start,” responded Alisa Carroll, an Amazon public relations manager. “While we don’t have a specific launch date to share right now, once we have a better sense of timing, we’ll look to begin hiring for hundreds of good-paying jobs for the region.”

Driving by the location that has been mysteriously referred to as Project Almond located on 73 acres in the planned Clearist Industrial Park, the pace of construction has picked up recently as bulldozers and dump trucks are working on a road leading from the site where one wall was hoisted up a few days ago near San Felipe Road.

Carroll was not able to answer BenitoLink’s questions as to the actual function of the fulfillment center. According to Amazon, though, there are six distinct types of fulfillment centers:

Sortable fulfillment center
Around 800,000 square feet in size, sortable fulfillment centers can employ more than 1,500 full-time associates. In these buildings, Amazon employees pick, pack and ship customer orders such as books, toys and housewares. It adds robots associates often work alongside robots, allowing them to learn new skills and helping create a more efficient process to meet customer demand.

Non-sortable fulfillment center
Ranging in size from 600,000 to 1 million square feet, non-sortable fulfillment centers employ more than 1,000 full-time associates. In these centers, associates pick, pack and ship bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment and rugs.

Sortation centers
At sortation centers, associates sort customer orders by final destination and consolidate them onto trucks for faster delivery. Amazon’s website states this sort center network provides full- and part-time career opportunities and is powering its ability to provide customers with everyday delivery, including Sunday delivery.

Receive centers
Amazon’s receive centers support customer fulfillment by taking in large orders of the types of inventory that it expects to quickly sell and allocating it to fulfillment centers within the network. Full- and part-time roles are available in these buildings, which are about 600,000 square feet in size.

Specialty
Amazon’s fulfillment network is also supported by additional types of buildings that handle specific categories of items or are pressed into service at peak times of the year such as the holiday season. Many of these buildings feature part-time opportunities with the option to convert to full-time.

Delivery stations
In these buildings, customer orders are prepared for last-mile delivery to customers. Amazon delivery providers enable every day shipping.

Amazon has been operating a delivery station in Hollister since September 2021.

Because of the square footage and the described use of distributing furniture and appliances, the new building will most likely fall into the non-sortable category.

The Planning Commission resolution that approved the project states it will provide an e-commerce fulfillment center and distribution facility. It will operate with approximately 449 employees, including 275 employees during the day shift and 174 employees during the night shift. During the day shift there would be 16 office workers, 169 warehouse workers, 10 security personnel and 80 drivers. During the night shift, there would be 15 office workers, 150 warehouse workers, and nine security personnel.

If Hollister’s newest facility follows similar Amazon facilities, robots will play an important role. According to Amazon, it has 175 fulfillment centers around the world; 26 have humans and robots working side by side.

“In addition, robotic animation benefits employees, as they take over performance of fulfillment centers’ less desirable, more tedious tasks,” the Amazon website states.

As described by Amazon, one type of robotics or bots are flat, wheeled, 300-pound machines that glide across facility floors, moving small bins and large pallets of products to associates. Other bots called palletizers “provide robotic muscle for the operation” as they identify and lift boxes from conveyor belts before stacking them on pallets for stowage or shipping. Then the six-ton robo-stows are used to lift even heavier items.

“Used to expedite the inbound process once truckloads of inventory reach the centers, the robo-stows that are currently employed lift pallets of inventory up to drive units on higher floors within fulfillment centers,” according to Amazon.

There are, though, some claims that robots and humans don’t always get along and there have been injuries.

According to a BBC report based on a study conducted by the Center for Investigative Reporting which claims to have acquired internal records for 150 warehouses over four years, “At the most common kind of Amazon ‘fulfillment center,’ serious injuries are 50% higher for those that have robots than those without.”

According to a Reveal News report, after Amazon debuted the robots in Tracy the serious injury rate there nearly quadrupled, going from 2.9 per 100 workers in 2015 to 11.3 in 2018, records show.

The report said Jonathan Meador watched the transition from his position loading boxes into big rig trailers. The article stated the robots at the Tracy warehouse were so efficient that humans could barely keep up and the pickers and packers were expected to move more products every minute, and more boxes shot down the conveyor belt toward Meador.

“Before robots, it was still tough, but it was manageable,” he said. Afterward, “we were in a fight that we just can’t win.”

As for replacing human workers, in a 2019 Reuters story, Scott Anderson, director of Amazon Robotics Fulfillment, said technology is at least 10 years away from fully automating the processing of a single order picked by a worker inside a warehouse. He also said the technology for a robot to pick a single product from a bin without damaging other products or picking multiple products at the same time in a way that could benefit the e-commerce retailer is years away.

Related BenitoLink stories

Amazon delivery hub opens in Hollister | BenitoLink

Amazon opening Hollister delivery facility Sept. 28 | BenitoLink

Hollister fast-tracked Amazon development without public input | BenitoLink

Tenant of jumbo fulfillment center still not revealed | BenitoLink

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The post Amazon confirms new fulfillment center in Hollister appeared first on BenitoLink.

SODUS, N.Y. — Daniel Bennett’s office at Sodus Intermediate School is a haven for kids in crisis.

When fourth, fifth or sixth graders here are fed up, ready to fight, or exhausting their teacher with their unfocused energy, they can visit Bennett’s office to jump on the mini trampoline, bounce on the balance ball chairs, or strum out their frustration on one of the guitars that hang on one wall.

Sometimes, the kids arrive angry, outraged at how they’ve been treated by a classmate or teacher; other times they show up sad, or overwhelmed. This spring morning, a boy came in crying, complaining he’d been treated unfairly during a game in gym class. He told Bennett he didn’t understand the game’s rules and was punished for breaking them.

Bennett, a doctoral student at Roberts Wesleyan College here on a year-long internship, helps each student identify their feelings, and validates them. While the student calms down, they might play a board game, shoot darts or mess with fidget toys.

On this day, though, the boy wasn’t interested in toys or games. He just wanted to talk — and be listened to.

“Sometimes you need to sit and be quiet,” Bennett said later.

Besides Bennett, Sodus Intermediate has two licensed psychologists on staff. But one functions as a school counselor, responsible for academic advising in addition to mental health counseling. Even with Bennett on board, it can be hard to meet the needs of all the kids and teachers in this low-income, rural district — especially since the pandemic.

“There’s a lot of trauma, and there are only so many hours in a day to meet with kids,” Bennett said.

Rates of anxiety and depression among youth and adolescents have reached record highs across the country, with the surgeon general calling kids’ declining mental health the “defining public health crisis of our time.” Yet, nationwide, there was just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students in 2020-21, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists. The shortages of school social workers and counselors are just as bad.

These deficits are due both to a lack of funding and a lack of providers. Some schools know they need more mental health providers, but they can’t afford to hire them. Others have the budget to hire, but can’t find a qualified provider. Colleges just aren’t producing enough of them, and low pay pushes some would-be school counselors into private practice or other specialties.

Now, spurred by an influx of federal funds, schools and colleges are undertaking an unprecedented effort to recruit and retain more school mental health providers. Districts are offering stipends to grad student interns, providing mentors to new hires, and creating online communities for isolated rural providers. Colleges are creating new programs to introduce high schoolers to school mental-health careers and launching virtual graduate degrees to attract busy professionals and far-flung students.

Bennett’s position at Sodus Intermediate, a 45-minute drive from Rochester, is funded through one of a pair of federal grant programs that received a huge funding increase in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, passed last year in response to the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, in Uvalde, Texas. The grant programs are also part of President Joe Biden’s effort to double the number of school-based mental health professionals.

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds. The agency estimates that the infusion of cash will prepare more than 14,000 new providers. And that’s just a portion of the $1 billion funding increase, with the remaining grants to be doled out over the next five years.

Schools also spent an estimated $2 billion in federal pandemic recovery dollars to hire mental health professionals — an investment that helped increase the number of social workers by nearly 50 percent, and the number of school counselors and psychologists by 10 percent, according to the education department.

Nationwide, there is just one school psychologist for every 1,127 K-12 students, a ratio well below the 500 students to one psychologist recommended by the National Association of School Psychologists

Bennett, the son of a school psychologist, said he feels drawn to the mental health field. He briefly considered a career in law, but settled on psychology after working in an inpatient clinic for children and adolescents after college.

“There were cases that would break your heart,” Bennett said. “But it kept pulling me back.”

But with one week remaining on his internship, he’s not yet sold on a career in school counseling. He’s worked in several settings since starting his program in clinical and school psychology in 2020, and found interest in them all.

“I’m open to seeing where the wind takes me,” he said.

Related: A surprising remedy for teens in mental health crises

At lunchtime, Bennett hurries to the cafeteria to collect four rambunctious fifth grade boys for a skills group. Trays in hand, they race down the hall to Bennett’s office, scarfing up tater tots directly into their mouths.

The topic today is listening. The group starts with a silly song about being a “whole body listener,” drawing or coloring what they hear or think as they listen.

When the song ends, Bennett asks the students to describe their drawings and then share which classmate did the best job of listening while they spoke.

Josh holds up a picture of a guy playing with his ears, and Bennett asks what it represents.

“Hear teachers talk,” Josh answers.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“You,” Josh says. “Your eyes were on me, and you weren’t tapping the floor.”

Matt, who is dressed head-to-toe in Spider-man attire, jumps in to defend himself. “The way I focus and calm down is by fidgeting,” he explains.

Tim goes next. Licking a red popsicle, he holds a drawing of an all-green face in front of his own. “I drew me a new face so I can make more friends,” he says.

The phone rings, interrupting the sharing. It’s a teacher who wants to know if she can send a student who is in crisis. Bennett says he has five minutes after the skills group ends — after that he’s got to meet with another teacher.

He hangs up the phone and turns back to Tim. “What about this face will help you make friends?” he asks.

“It’s green,” Tim responds.

“And who was the best listener?” Bennett asks.

“Apollo — he was listening with his ears,” Tim says.

When the session ends, Bennett returns the boys to their classrooms, and picks up the student who the teacher had called about. As they walk to Bennett’s office, the student says that he accidentally squirted water on his teacher’s phone, and she smacked him on the arm. “Now I’m mad all day,” the student says.

They head back to Bennett’s office, where the student calms down by strumming on a guitar. Bennett asks the boy what type of music is his favorite (country, he says), and tells him he used to play bass in a high school band; he had hair down to his shoulders. They talk about the recent evaluation the student received for special education services, and the boy confides that he’s started a new medication.

When five minutes are up, Bennett tells the student it’s time to go. As the boy leaves, Bennett asks what one thing he could do to get through class.

“Ignore my teacher,” the student says.

“Let it wash off you like water,” Bennett says, encouragingly, before rushing to meet another teacher.

Related: School counselors keep kids on track. Why are they first to be cut?

Rural districts tend to have a harder time recruiting school psychologists, said Kelly Vaillancourt Strobach, director of policy and advocacy for the National Association of School Psychologists. There are fewer training programs near rural districts than near urban ones, and graduates often look for work close to where they’re trained, she said.

But even if more graduates were willing to relocate, the number of students graduating from programs in psychology, counseling and social work isn’t keeping pace with districts’ growing demand for mental health services. Opening up the programs to more students isn’t really an option, either — there aren’t enough faculty or site supervisors to train them, according to Strobach.

Another reason schools struggle to recruit and retain mental health providers is in part because of the low pay. (The average salary for a school psychologist is about $88,000; for clinical and counseling psychologists it’s $103,000; industrial psychologists, who work in businesses and organizations, earn an average of $145,000.)

Since December, the U.S. Department of Education has awarded $286 million to 264 grantees in nearly every state to boost the training and hiring of school mental health professionals, particularly those from marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds.

In addition, schools often ask providers, especially school counselors, to take on administrative duties, like test proctoring and cafeteria and bathroom monitoring.

While counselors expect to perform some duties beyond their professional specialty, asking them to do too much “pulls them away from the work they’re passionate about” and contributes to counselor turnover, said Eric Sparks, deputy executive director of the American School Counselor Association.

New York is doing better than some states in hiring and retaining school psychologists: Its ratio is 1:662. But before the six districts received the grant, only 5 of 19 schools had a social worker on staff, Lustica said.

With the help of the federal dollars, the districts have been able to hire roughly 20 interns in psychology, social work and counseling each year for the past four years. They pay them a stipend and mileage — a rarity in graduate internships — and place them in interdisciplinary groups that meet twice a month to review cases and share ideas on how to approach them.

By paying their interns, and nurturing a spirit of collaboration among them, the districts hope to convince them to return to work in a school when they graduate. So far, that strategy seems to be working: More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York, Lustica said.

Boston Public Schools is also using stipends to attract potential job candidates — particularly those that match the district’s demographics. Though Boston has had more success recruiting than many districts, it’s struggled to hire bilingual providers and those from underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds, said Andria Amador, the district’s senior director of behavioral health services.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations,” Amador said.

“Trying to enter a field that makes you work for free for two years is impossible for some of our economically disadvantaged populations.”

Andria Amador, senior director of behavioral health services, Boston Public Schools

Other recipients of the federal grants are trying different approaches. In Texas, a “grow your own” program is paying teachers to pursue degrees in counseling; in Wisconsin, a new virtual master’s program is reaching Native students on reservations located hours from a college campus.

Leah M. Rouse, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee who is helping lead the effort to recruit Indigenous students, said that colleges used to be reluctant to offer online programs, worrying quality would suffer. But “the pandemic showed we can do quality training and supervision with remote instruction,” she said.

Nevada, which in 2021 had just one school psychologist for every 2,000 students, has started recruiting in high school, offering a course on school mental health professions that lets high schoolers earn college credit. Its colleges have begun training “school psychology assistants” to take over some of the administrative duties placed on licensed school psychologists, freeing them to spend more time with students.

And in Virginia, educators are tackling high turnover among isolated rural providers through an online professional development program that connects the providers to colleagues in other schools.

Related: Campus religious groups step into a new realm: mental health counseling

Back at Sodus Intermediate, Bennett is running late for his meeting with Jennifer Gibson, a longtime special education teacher with a challenging class. But when he arrives in the cafeteria, Gibson isn’t there. She shows up a minute later, saying she got caught up disciplining kids.

Bennett and Gibson meet fairly often to discuss strategies for dealing with difficult student behaviors, he says. Their sessions typically start with venting, and this day is no exception.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters. But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

Daniel Bennett, doctoral student on a year-long internship as a school counselor

Gibson tells Bennett she’s relieved that a particularly disruptive student has left her class, and frustrated that he was put there to begin with.

“He would have been better served elsewhere, don’t you think?” she asks Bennett.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I hear your frustration.”

Then, they move on to problem-solving. Bennett asks Gibson what she was disciplining students for.

“Just kids being sassy,” she says. One student, in particular, wouldn’t settle down after lunch.

“What do you think was the reason?” Bennett asks.

Gibson speculates that it might have been the change in seasons — the warmer weather always makes transitions harder.

Then Gibson remembers that the student hadn’t eaten; he’d hit a kid on the bus and spent the lunch period in suspension. She’d forgotten to give him his usual “brain break” after lunch, too.

“So that’s my fault,” she says, guiltily.

“There’s no blaming or shaming here,” Bennett reminds her. They discuss how Gibson can ensure the student gets his energy out before returning to class after lunch.

At one point in the meeting, Gibson asks Bennett when his last day is. Next Thursday, he tells her.

“That’s awful,” she says. “I wish we could pay to hire you.”

More than three-quarters of former interns have been hired into high-need districts in New York via a federal grant program.

Stephen Humbert, Bennett’s supervisor and the school’s practicing psychologist, said having interns in the building two days a week helps him support more students and teachers. It also exposes staff to fresh ideas and theories, he said.

But Bennett, who starts a new internship at a healthcare organization in Pennsylvania later this month, now doubts he’ll settle in a school when he finishes his doctoral program next spring. With $150,000 in student debt, he’ll need to find something a little more lucrative.

“I love the community in schools — getting to eat lunch with colleagues, being surrounded by youngsters,” Bennett wrote in an e-mail on the last day of his internship. “But it would be very hard to support myself on the entry level salaries in this setting.”

This story about federal grants for counseling was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post The school counselor pipeline is broken. Can new federal money fix it? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

For months, West Virginia officials have been touting record-low unemployment numbers. That continued in June, as officials announced that only 3.3% of West Virginians were unemployed and actively looking for work. 

But there’s less to cheer about when it comes to the state’s fairly stagnant labor force participation rate. That figure, which essentially measures the percentage of working-age adults who are either employed or actively looking for work, isn’t the most well-known economic indicator. But it’s one that economists say matters just as much, if not more, than unemployment numbers.  

“Unemployment is not the problem,” said John Deskins, the director of West Virginia University’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research. “Our problem is we have a relatively small percentage of the adult population that is engaged in the labor force in the first place.” 

The labor force participation rate tracks the percentage of working age people who are either actively working or seeking employment. It’s currently 54.6%, the lowest in the nation and well below the national participation rate of 62.6%. And it has been in that last place position or extremely close to it for about five decades.  

To come closer to the national rate, the state would need to increase its workforce by roughly 100,000 people. 

But understanding the why behind the low rate is more difficult. In several interviews, economists told Mountain State Spotlight that a number of factors could contribute to West Virginia’s persistent labor force problem, including population decline and limited opportunities for economic mobility. There are also lower numbers of college graduates and the continued decline of once-prominent state industries to consider. 

It all combines to create a situation where the state struggles on two different sides: on one end there is an issue with retaining the current and future workers already living here. And on the other end, there is an issue with attracting out-of-state workers and their families who might move into the state if its workforce was doing better. As issues mount, a growing group of nonprofits, academics, and local governments see addressing the former as the most immediate concern.

How nonprofits are bringing new energy to addressing West Virginia’s workforce woes

After wrapping up a stint in the Army and returning to his hometown, Huntington native Trey Chambers was working in a restaurant and considering going back to school. But he was in his mid-twenties and wasn’t sure college was the best option, particularly once the pandemic hit.

That’s when a boss told him about NewForce, a technical skills program that provides a free six-month training in software development. Chambers was accepted last year, and after a busy few months juggling his restaurant job with front and back-end development training, he finished the program in January. 

Since then, he’s put his skills to use as a new web developer for Bulldog Creative, a Huntington advertising agency. In his current role he primarily helps create websites, using skills that he had struggled to build on his own before entering NewForce. 

“The only thing I had to risk was my time, and without this [opportunity] I would still be in the restaurant industry,” he said. 

In some ways, the start of Chambers’ story is common among young people in West Virginia, many of whom face difficulty finding meaningful employment and gaining the skills vital to land better paying jobs. And to help address the problem nonprofits like Generation West Virginia, which runs NewForce, have stepped in to help with job training as a way to slow the brain drain. 

“I think that in West Virginia we have grown up with the understanding that to be successful you have to leave,” said Alex Weld, the executive director of Generation West Virginia. “We’ve got to be better about celebrating the opportunities here and making those opportunities clear for West Virginians.” 

Besides NewForce, Generation West Virginia is also trying to keep more young people in West Virginia through a nine-month fellowship program and its Career Connector, which connects job seekers and employers.

The resource was useful for Jessica Stidham, who moved to West Virginia with her husband in 2015. The Career Connector helped her land a new job as an assistant director of First Ascent, a new program aimed at developing and retaining other young workers in the state. 

For her, addressing the state’s workforce crisis is crucial, not only to improve economic conditions, but also to give workers something that she has found for herself here: a sense of fulfillment. 

“It is one thing to have a job with a steady income, that’s definitely important,” she said. “But being able to work and travel and have a good quality of life and ability to enjoy natural resources has [also] been a big draw.” 

But job training and networks are only part of the solution. 

“A lot of the barriers to the workforce are human,” said Coalfield Development founder Brandon Dennison. The organization aims to reimagine Southern West Virginia’s economy, taking an area once dominated by coal and transforming it to handle new industries.

Part of doing that, Dennison says, means working with people who face bigger challenges than skill gaps: people in recovery, people who have struggled to gain employment, and others who have faced significant barriers in a job search. 

“We see ourselves modeling a different and better way to do workforce development,” he said. “We know we can’t re-employ everyone that needs to be re-employed but we do create paid jobs for people who face severe barriers to employment.” 

Coalfield Development also plays a leading role in the Appalachian Climate Technology, or ACT Now Coalition. The group includes several nonprofits, state universities, municipalities and local governments, unions, and other groups, all focused on improving both economic and environmental conditions in the state. Last fall, the coalition was awarded a Build Back Better grant from the federal government, receiving $62.8 million and another $30 million in philanthropic funds to support its efforts.

Even so, nonprofit leaders like Dennison and Weld do face difficulties, especially with scale. Efforts to expand the workforce require a lot of money, and nonprofits aren’t guaranteed to reach every person in need of help. This means that even with the progress independent groups have accomplished, deeper solutions, statewide solutions, remain necessary. 

Increasing West Virginia’s workforce requires a wide-ranging list of solutions — many of them people-oriented

While the sorts of jobs and skills training offered by these nonprofit organizations, government offices like Workforce WV, and local community and technical colleges are in demand, closing a skills gap is only one aspect of what needs to be done to help West Virginia’s workforce.

There also needs to be a focus on what Deskins referred to as “human capital”: improving the conditions that affect a person’s interest in and ability to work. That can include issues with transportation access, health, substance abuse, discrimination, and previous interactions with the justice system. 

Another factor that economists identified as a particularly pressing — and potentially more easily solvable — issue is increasing access to child care. The latter is an especially significant factor for women, who have entered the workforce in significant numbers in recent decades, but who are often the first to leave due to child care reasons. West Virginia currently has the lowest female workforce participation rate in the country. 

“I think child care access is sort of an understudied thing in West Virginia, in terms of its contribution to labor force participation,” said Heather Stephens, the director of WVU’s Regional Research Institute. “We don’t have good child care access and that makes it very difficult for parents of young children.” 

The endgame goal then, is for a number of changes to happen that all contribute to better situations for workers. 

“I wish the problem was tax policy, because that is a problem that we could fix easily,” Deskins said. “But if you have a bad drug abuse problem, a bad health problem, it takes a long time, years, to fix those.”

Here’s why West Virginia has struggled to increase labor force participation for decades appeared first on Mountain State Spotlight, West Virginia’s civic newsroom.