Most of America’s rural areas are doomed to decline : The Conversation

Since the Great Recession, most of the nation’s rural counties have struggled to recover lost jobs and retain their people. The story is markedly different in the nation’s largest urban communities.

I’m writing from Iowa, where every four years presidential hopefuls swoop in to test how voters might respond to their various ideas for fixing the country’s problems.

But what to do about rural economic and persistent population decline is the one area that has always confounded them all.

The facts are clear and unarguable. Most of the nation’s smaller urban and rural counties are not growing and will not grow.

Let’s start with my analysis of U.S. Commerce Department data.

Metropolitan areas consist of those counties with central cities of at least 50,000, along with the surrounding counties that are economically dependent on them. They make up 36% of all counties. Between 2008, the cusp of the Great Recession, and 2017, they enjoyed nearly 99% of all job and population growth.

 

Source: Most of America’s rural areas are doomed to decline : The Conversation

An alternative to propping up coal power plants: Retrain workers for solar : The Conversation,

The Trump administration announced new pollution rules for coal-fired power plants designed to keep existing coal power plants operating more and save American coal mining jobs.

Profitability for U.S. coal power plants has plummeted, and one major coal company after another has filed for bankruptcy, including the world’s largest private-sector coal company, Peabody Energy.

The main reason coal is in decline is less expensive natural gas and renewable energy like solar. Coal employment has dropped so low there are fewer than 53,000 coal miners in total in the U.S. (for comparison, the failing retailer J.C. Penny has about twice as many workers).

The EPA estimates the new rules will cause about 1,400 more premature deaths a year from coal-related air pollution by 2030. The Trump administration could avoid the premature American deaths from coal pollution – which amount to about 52,000 per year in total – and still help the coal miners themselves by retraining them for a more profitable industry, such as the solar industry.

A study I co-authored analyzed the question of retraining current coal workers for employment in the solar industry. We found that this transition is feasible in most cases and would even result in better pay for nearly all of the current coal workers.

How to make the jump?

What is left of the coal mining industry represents a unique demographic compared to the rest of America. It is white (96.4 percent); male (96.2 percent); aging, with an average age of 43.8 years old; and relatively uneducated, with 76.7 percent having earned only a high school degree or equivalent. Many are highly skilled, however, with the largest sector of jobs being equipment operators at 27 percent. Many of these skills can be transferred directly into the solar industry.

 

Source: An alternative to propping up coal power plants: Retrain workers for solar : The Conversation

Grab your popcorn. This showdown between Philip Hammond and John McDonnell is everything. | The Canary

Grab your popcorn. This showdown between Philip Hammond and John McDonnell is everything. from The Canary on 8th September 2017

Source: Grab your popcorn. This showdown between Philip Hammond and John McDonnell is everything. | The Canary

Revealed: The man who sacked a woman on maternity leave is now head campaigner for women’s equality in Scotland

Powerful and from this I feel worried for equality rights for persons in Scotland.

I am not sure how all this relates politically in Scotland, but I would like to know what the SNPs views are on this. So come forth Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon, MSP for Glasgow Govan and First Minister of Scotland.

Westminster Confidential

John Wilkes, now chief executive of the Scottish Equality and Human Rights Commission Pic credit:Third Force News

CROSS POSTED ON BYLINE.COM

Meet John  Wilkes. He is now chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission in Scotland. The ECHR’s top campaign at the moment is fighting against  the discrimination  of women who take maternity leave from their jobs.

As the ECHR’s own research says on its latest campaigns website says:

• Around one in nine mothers (11%) reported that they were either dismissed; made compulsorily redundant, where others in their workplace were not; or treated so poorly they felt they had to leave their job; if scaled up to the general population this could mean as many as 54,000 mothers a year.”

Great words. But they didn’t seem to reach John Wilkes before he took up his highly paid post at the ECHR in Glasgow.

Then he held the job…

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Robert Halfon v Jeremy Corbyn: The battle for the working class vote | David Hencke

 

Jeremy Corbyn’s success in attracting tens of thousands of new Labour supporters was given a rare  accolade this week at the Conservative Party Conference.

Robert Halfon, Tory MP for Harlow and the skills minister, told a Conservative  Party fringe meeting  organised by Respublica how the Labour leader had attracted these people because they saw him representing  their ” moral and ethical ” values and being fair minded rather than representing ” the privileged few”.

No doubt this would lead to a furious denial  from the Labour

Source: Robert Halfon v Jeremy Corbyn: The battle for the working class vote | David Hencke

Trump breaks with party on trade as he threatens tariffs – Business Insider

The speech underscored just how far removed he is from typical GOP orthodoxy.

Source: Trump breaks with party on trade as he threatens tariffs – Business Insider

Secular Talk: Fox News Attacks Minimum Wage Worker, Who Couldn’t Afford Food

Beastrabban\'s Weblog

This shows just how low and bitterly anti-poor Fox News is. In this piece from Secular Talk, Kyle Kulinski discusses a segment from Fox News in which the host, Sandra Smith, invited on to talk cosily with Stefanie Williams, the author of an internet piece attacking Talia Jane. Jane was a worker on the minimum wage, who had written a piece on Yelp stating that despite working full time for her employer, she still could not afford to buy food, as 80 per cent of her income was spent on rent. She stated that she was tired of working for an employer that did not watch her back, and included her paypal address and an appeal for people to help her pay her rent. This piece got her the sack from the company’s CEO.

Smith congratulates Williams for writing her piece attacking Jane, stating that millennials have an undeserved sense…

View original post 451 more words

Job advertisement

An encouraging outlook for the UK

UK showing signs of a recovery

Jobs outlook encouraging

From the above articles it would appear that the UK may be on the road to recovery and if so, it is extremely welcome.  After the successes of the 2012 Olympics and Para-Olympics this will indeed be good news after many months of doom and gloom.

What we do not want is the Trade Unions to take industrial action this will only act as a hindrance to the UK recovery and at worse could halt or reverse the steps to further recovery.

Even worse is the teachers threatening industrial action being their way to  show their discontent over pay and pensions. As I have have previously stated in my post ‘Teachers’, even taking into account the proposed changes to their pensions, these pensions will still be very good and way far better than anyone in the private sector could receive.

Any major action taken by the Trade Unions can only have a detrimental effect on the economy of the UK and with the proposed actions of the teachers, will reduce the jobs prospects of our future generation,  With children already leaving school with a poor standard of English, this proposed action by teachers will not improve the situation.

I can only hope that the Trade Unions and the teachers, stop to think before taking action, in what will amount to action of a political nature, where the root reason is to bring down the Government and not to benefit their members.