Rural America can be idyllic, but many communities still need support.
Mint Images via Getty ImagesRandolph Hubach, Purdue University and Cody Mullen, Purdue University
Rural America faces many challenges that Congress and the federal government could help alleviate under the new Trump administration.
Rural hospitals and their obstetrics wards have been closing at a rapid pace, leaving rural residents traveling farther for health care. Affordable housing is increasingly hard to find in rural communities, where pay is often lower and poverty higher than average. Land ownership is changing, leaving more communities with outsiders wielding influence over their local resources.
Here are some ways we believe the Trump administration could work with Congress to boost these communities’ health and economies.
1. Rural health care access
One of the greatest challenges to rural health care is its vulnerability to shifts in policy and funding cuts because of rural areas’ high rates of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
Funding from those federal programs affects rural hospitals, and rural hospitals are struggling.
Nearly half of rural hospitals operate in the red today, and over 170 rural hospitals have closed since 2010. The low population density of rural areas can make it difficult for hospitals to cover operating costs when their patient volume is low. These hospital closures have left rural residents traveling an extra 20 miles (32 km) on average to receive inpatient health care services and an extra 40 miles (64 km) for specialty care services.
The government has created programs to try to help keep hospitals operating, but they all require funding that is at risk. For example:
The Low-volume Hospital Adjustment Act, first implemented in 2005, has helped numerous rural hospitals by boosting their Medicare payments per patient, but it faces regular threats of funding cuts. It and several other programs to support Medicare-dependent hospitals are set to expire on March 31, 2025, when the next federal budget is due.
The rural emergency hospital model, created in 2020, helps qualifying rural facilities to maintain access to essential emergency and outpatient hospital services, also by providing higher Medicare payments. Thus far, only 30 rural hospitals have transitioned to this model, in part because they would have to eliminate inpatient care services, which also limits outpatient surgery and other medical services that could require overnight care in the event of an emergency.
Rural emergency hospitals can get extra funding, but there’s a catch: They have no inpatient beds, so people in need of longer care must go farther.AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis
Services for pregnant women have also gotten harder to find in rural areas.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth – the ability to meet with your doctor over video – wasn’t widely used. It could be difficult for doctors to ensure reimbursement, and the logistics of meeting federal requirements and privacy rules could be challenging.
The pandemic changed that. Improving technology allowed telehealth to quickly expand, reducing people’s contact with sick patients, and the government issued waivers for Medicare and Medicaid to pay for telehealth treatment. That opened up new opportunities for rural patients to get health care and opportunities for providers to reach more patients.
However, the Medicare and Medicaid waivers for most telehealth services were only temporary. Only payments for mental and behavioral health teleheath services continued, and those are set to expire with the federal budget in March 2025, unless they are renewed.
Like their urban peers, rural communities face a shortage of affordable housing.
Unemployment in rural areas today exceeds levels before the COVID-19 pandemic. Job growth and median incomes lag behind urban areas, and rural poverty rates are higher.
Rural housing prices have been exacerbated by continued population growth over the past four years, lower incomes compared with their urban peers, limited employment opportunities and few high-quality homes available for rent or sale. Rural communities often have aging homes built upon outdated or inadequate infrastructure, such as deteriorating sewer and water lines.
Rental homes in older towns can become run down. Community maintenance of pipes and other services also requires funding.LawrenceSawyer/E+ via Getty Images
One proposal to help people looking for affordable rural housing is the bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, which calls for creating a new federal tax credit to spur the development and renovation of family housing in distressed urban, suburban and rural neighborhoods.
Similarly, the Section 502 Direct Loan Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which subsidizes mortgages for low-income applicants to obtain safe housing, could be expanded with additional funding to enable more people to receive subsidized mortgages.
3. Locally owned land benefits communities
Seniors age 65 and older own 40% of the agricultural land in the U.S., according to the American Farmland Trust. That means that more than 360 million acres of farmland could be transferred to new owners in the next few decades. If their heirs aren’t interested in farming, that land could be sold to large operations or real estate developers.
A farmer carries organic squash during harvest. Young farmers often struggle to find land to expand their operations.Thomas Barwick/Stone via Getty Images
Congress can take some steps to help communities keep more farmland locally owned.
The proposed Farm Transitions Act, for example, would establish a commission on farm transitions to study issues that affect locally owned farms and provide recommendations to help transition agricultural operations to the next generation of farmers and ranchers.
About 30% of farmers have been in business for less than 10 years, and many of them rent the land they farm. Programs such as USDA’s farm loan programs and the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program help support local land purchases and could be improved to identify and eliminate barriers that communities face.
We believe that by addressing these issues, Congress and the new administration can help some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens. Efforts to build resilient and strong rural communities will benefit everyone.
Randolph Hubach, Professor of Public Health, Purdue University and Cody Mullen, Clinical Professor of Public Health, Purdue University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Rents across the U.S. have climbed to staggering levels in recent years. Millions of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, a situation that housing experts call being cost burdened.
High rents affect almost all segments of the population but are an especially heavy burden for immigrants, particularly those who have not yet become U.S. citizens. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, play important roles in the U.S. economy. They often provide the cheapest labor in the riskiest of industries. Yet they are still not broadly accepted or supported in many U.S. cities.
We are geographers who study housing market issues, including racial-ethnic diversity and housing affordability. Our research on Nashville, which has emerged as an immigrant metropolis in the Southern U.S., suggests that foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens are far more burdened by high rents than other groups.
Many immigrant workers in Nashville spend more than 50% of their incomes on rent. This makes it hard for them to afford education and job training, healthy food, health care and other necessities that can help them participate as productive residents. Heavy rent burdens undermine their ability to have a higher standard of living and to be included in mainstream society.
As immigrants increasingly fan out across the U.S., we believe cities receiving new foreign-born residents should anticipate a growing need for affordable housing.
A 2022 study found that immigrant families in San Diego faced some of the highest rent burdens in the surrounding county.
Today about 37% of U.S. homes are occupied by renters. By 2020, almost 46% of U.S. renters paid more than 30% of their household income toward rent. As of June 2021, the median monthly rent in the 50 largest U.S. cities was $1,575 – an 8.1% increase from June 2020.
The heaviest rent burdens fall disproportionately on minorities. Almost 46% of African American-led renter households are rent burdened, compared with 34% of white households.
The COVID-19 pandemic worsened housing insecurity for people of color because of longstanding racially targeted policies and widespread health and economic disparities. Renters of color faced higher cost burdens and eviction rates. In Nashville, this was especially true in Latino and Somali communities.
Foreign-born residents make up 7.15% of the U.S. population today. Most of these immigrants are not citizens, although more than 878,000 people became citizens in 2023. The median length of time these new citizens spent in the U.S. before becoming naturalized was seven years.
Nashville is the largest metropolis in Tennessee and one of the fastest-growing immigrant gateways in the South. It is home to over 37% of Tennessee’s Latino population and has been a major destination for Latinos and other foreign-born residents since the early 2000s.
For our research, we used census data estimates for 2015-19 from the National Historical Geographic Information System covering metro Nashville’s 13 counties, which contain 372 census tracts. We found that Nashville’s most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods had the highest levels of rent burden.
This includes census tracts with high shares of foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens, especially if those residents are Black or Latino. Our analysis of the 37 census tracts (10% of the region’s total) with the largest shares of foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens shows that the average monthly rent paid by a household in these tracts was $1,306.20, compared with $1,288.70 metrowide.
In the 37 tracts with the largest shares of Latino residents and Black residents, we found that about 21% of households spent more than 50% of their household income on rent.
Our findings corroborate other scholarly analyses of Nashville’s Somali refugees, who tend to be clustered in communities that also house other diverse groups, including Egyptians and other African immigrants. In these areas, gentrification and urban renewal have forced several Black and Somali communities from ownership into renting.
More encouragingly, we found that tracts with newer housing stock, built since 2000, have relatively lower rent burdens even though those tracts are home to many Black and non-Asian minority residents. This suggests that newer development has an important role to play in mitigating rent, especially in suburban, relatively affordable locations. In the 37 census tracts with the most foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens, about 28% of the total housing stock was built in 2000 or later, compared with 23% across Nashville.
Federal, state and city officials break ground in 2022 on a mixed-income residential development at Cayce Place, Nashville’s largest subsidized housing property. The city is replacing aging structures on the site, built between 1941 and 1954.Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, CC BY-ND
Easing rent burdens
One of the best ways to mitigate rent burdens is to build more housing and create affordable housing. However, communities sometimes oppose affordable housing projects and pro-development zoning because of fears of crime, traffic congestion or populations viewed as undesirable. Nashville is not immune to this syndrome.
However, critics argue that the council gives too much weight to anti-development arguments. And there is little discussion of specific ways to help groups that are ineligible for benefits and assistance that are available to U.S. citizens.
Members of the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition celebrate on March 26, 2019, after the defeat of a state bill that would have barred most landlords from renting housing to people in the U.S. illegally.AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise
A priority for cities
Our research shows that creating more rental opportunities can help reduce rent burdens for all. We see great potential to take this research further through community-based investigations of local nuances that may add to rent burdens, especially factors and processes that can’t be adequately captured in quantitative data analysis. Many local actors have important roles to play, including elected officials and local nonprofits and community organizations that work to promote rights for immigrants and refugees.
Given the important role that immigrants play in filling jobs and contributing to local economies, we believe that helping them afford housing is a smart strategy, especially for growth-oriented cities.
Madhuri Sharma, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee and Mikhail Samarin, Lecturer in Geography and Sustainability, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Is nuclear power a necessary part of the energy transition away from fossil fuels? As the debate rages on, new technologies and smaller reactors may be shifting the balance.
By Nicola Jones
In an online video from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a cartoon simulation shows a tsunami wiping out one of their future nuclear power stations and cutting off power. What happens next? Not much: The reactor quietly shuts itself down. “It cools off just by sitting there, no moving parts or fluids, no operator actions,” says the reassuring video. “We’ve designed a reactor that is inherently safe no matter the events.”
The Seattle-based Ultra Safe and dozens of other companies like it are at the forefront of a global nuclear energy revival. As the world urgently needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get the planet’s temperature under control, policymakers, companies and researchers are reexamining nuclear energy as a green alternative that can help bolster the power produced by renewables like wind and solar. Today the industry is emerging from a period of stagnation, with a promise to double or triple its capacity by 2050.
That revival is undergirded by two hot technology trends. Companies like Ultra Safe are aiming to build small modular reactors (SMRs) designed to be just a fraction of the size of former plants, to reduce both building costs and the scope of possible disasters. And many are aiming to utilize new technologies designed to make meltdown accidents impossible and to create less long-lived waste.
This video (from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a nuclear power company) shows the safety features built into a design for a small modular reactor.
CREDIT: ULTRA SAFE NUCLEAR CORPORATION
But the surge in interest is not without controversy. As with everything in the nuclear landscape, debate rages about whether society actually needs nuclear to tackle climate change, and whether the new systems are as shiny as they seem — with reasonable arguments for and against every promise and risk. Some say the new technologies could offer a fantastic solution to our energy woes; others say nuclear is beset with so many environmental, social and economic problems that it is best abandoned in favor of other ways to meet the globe’s energy demands.
The next few years will decide what course nuclear power takes in the world’s energy future. “This is a moment of truth,” says Francesca Giovannini, a nuclear policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School. Over the next few decades, nuclear power is “either going to make it, or that industry is fundamentally done for. ... It’s 50/50 how this goes.”
Ups and downs in nuclear power output
Nuclear power poses some obvious risks — meltdown accidents, nuclear fuel being diverted to weapons programs, environmental issues posed by mining for uranium, the problems of storing nuclear waste. Against a backdrop of such concerns, alongside shifting economics of energy production, nuclear power production started to level off in the early 2000s and even dipped briefly after the Fukushima power plant accident of 2011. Some nations, most notably Germany, decided to shutter their nuclear programs entirely. But global nuclear power production is now starting to inch upward again.
Today, nuclear plants produce about 10 percent of global electricity, making nuclear the second largest source of non-fossil-fuel energy after hydropower. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in operation globally; another 60 or so are now being built, and around 100 are on order or planned.
Most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for keeping the world below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming include some kind of increase in nuclear power capacity. In the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) pathway to net zero, global nuclear power production doubles over 2022 levels by 2050. A key reason for this is that nuclear is seen as a good way to provide consistent baseload power to prop up more variable renewable sources of energy like wind or solar. Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear.
Nuclear has plenty of advantages: It produces no carbon emissions (and, counterintuitively, releases less radioactive uranium and other elements into the environment than burning coal does). It takes up a lot less land than renewables, a not insignificant consideration. If the goal is to decarbonize quickly and with as little social pain as possible, “nuclear is essential,” says Kai Vetter, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
At the UN’s Convention on Climate Change meeting in Dubai in December 2023, more than 20 nations signed a declaration to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. And cash is flowing into this effort. In 2020, the US Department of Energy (DOE) notably gave $160 million for two demonstration plants to get up and running by 2027. And in 2022, the European Union declared that some nuclear projects could call themselves “green” in the same way as renewables, opening the door to environmental financing mechanisms.
But as with almost every issue relating to nuclear power, the arguments in favor of nuclear have their detractors. Public policy expert M.V. Ramana at the University of British Columbia is one of many, for example, who say that baseload power is an outdated concept. A smart, diverse and flexible electric grid, they argue, can assure a reliable power supply by shunting power among sources and storage facilities.
And with the cost of renewables falling fast, today’s economic estimates about the relative costs of power sources may not mean much in the future.
Then there’s the question of safety. The grand total of lives lost from all nuclear power generation to date, while hard to quantify, is certainly far lower than the number of people killed by air pollution related to the burning of fossil fuels; a recent paper by NASA scientists concluded that nuclear power saved roughly 1.8 million lives from 1971 to 2009 thanks to avoided air pollution. By some accounts nuclear power has also proved less deadly than wind power, which has been linked to drownings at offshore wind farm sites and helicopter collisions with turbines.
But fatality is arguably a blunt way to measure the impacts of the nuclear industry, which also include the risk of accidents contaminating large tracts of land, plus numerous other effects related to such things as mining and waste storage. Ramana has documented how the burden of these last issues falls disproportionately on Indigenous anddisempowered communities, working against the goals of social justice. Nuclear power, he writes, “does not fit with any idea of a responsible and cleaner energy system.”
Small and shiny: New nuclear technologies
If we are to pursue nuclear power at the scale called for by the IEA, it will take a herculean effort. The IEA’s pathway requires the world to ramp up from building five big nuclear plants per year to 20 per year over the next decade. Big plants typically cost billions of dollars and come with big financial risks. Westinghouse Electric Company, for example, recently filed for bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars of cost overruns during the construction of four nuclear plants in the United States.
One plan for reducing those epic and prohibitive costs is to build small modular reactors, ranging from reactors that can be shipped on a truck and produce a couple of hundred megawatts, to tiny single-megawatt sizes that are more akin to hefty diesel generators. The modules could be pre-built in a factory and shipped to a site for installation. All this should make these reactors less frightening prospects for investors (though the end price per unit of electricity might wind up higher than that from a larger nuclear power plant).
A handful of SMRs are already in operation in Russia, China and India. Dozens more are in development. Canada has a national SMR action plan, and as of 2021 there were 10 SMR proposals under review (including one from Ultra Safe).
But so far, the promise of enticingly low costs for SMR builds hasn’t materialized, says Granger Morgan, a physicist and codirector of the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon. Morgan has crunched the numbers for nuclear in the US and was disappointed. “I thought SMRs were going to hold much more promise, but we can’t make the numbers wash,” he says.
That message was hammered home in November 2023 when the company NuScale scrapped its high-profile advanced plans to build an underground SMR in Idaho in the face of cost hikes. “Would it be nice to have nuclear? Yes absolutely,” says Morgan. “Will it be affordable? That’s very much an open question.”
Others argue that small isn’t always beautiful. While smaller plants present a smaller risk from smaller potential accidents, this strategy also means more plants overall, which means more facilities to protect against theft and terrorism. “You have way more fissile material dispersed; you will have to secure way more infrastructure,” says Giovannini. “I mean, that becomes a mess.”
Next generation nuclear
While some are focusing on making nuclear plants smaller, there’s a parallel movement to make them safer and more efficient. The next generation of reactor designs — Generation IV, in the industry’s lingo — includes a suite of six major reactor families, all very different from today’s standard, each with many possible variants under development. Much of the attention (particularly in the US) has been focused on three of these: high-temperature gas-cooled, molten salt and sodium-cooled.
The ideas behind these technologies, and even some early-stage power plants, have been around for decades. But the new variants of these old ideas combine novel fuels and designs, promising to be safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly. “They’re doing all kinds of whizz-bang, high-tech stuff,” says Morgan, who has no doubt that newer reactors can be made safer than old ones.
Most existing reactors are water-cooled uranium systems, which were chosen as the dominant technology largely as a quirk of history. Like all reactor types, they have their pros and cons. They need high pressures to stop their coolant waters from boiling off at typical operating temperatures around 300 degrees Celsius. And they are designed to work with relatively slow-moving neutrons — the subatomic particles that collide with nuclear fuel to initiate nuclear fission. Slow-moving neutrons are more likely to interact with fuel particles, but systems that use them are also limited in the kinds of fuels they can use. Catastrophe can strike if the fission reaction runs amok or the reactor gets too hot and the core “melts down,” as happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, spewing radiation into the environment.
The latest models of water-cooled reactors (sometimes called Gen III Plus, including many SMRs) use new design tricks to reduce the number of safety systems that require human intervention, aiming to stop accidents in their tracks automatically. Gen IV reactors, though, use entirely different coolant materials, are usually designed to operate at higher, more efficient temperatures, and often use faster-speed neutrons that can convert the most prevalent natural isotopes of uranium into usable fuel, or even feed on nuclear waste.
High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, for example, run at temperatures up to 950°C, making them 20 to 33 percent more thermally efficient than water-cooled reactors. Since the core materials used in these reactors are typically stable up to 1,600°C, which is hotter than lava, there’s a large margin of safety. The reactor in Ultra Safe’s video is an SMR that falls into this category; its small size helps, too, with passive cooling. Ultra Safe also makes their own fuel pellets, encased in a bespoke material that they say retains radioactive materials even in extreme conditions. They’re hoping to build their first commercial micro-reactor in Canada.
In molten salt reactors, both fuel and coolant are already liquid. So meltdowns, in the traditional sense, are impossible. And liquid-sodium-cooled reactors have a built-in safety feature: If they heat up, the liquid sodium expands and allows more neutrons to escape through the gaps between atoms, so the reaction (which is driven by neutrons) naturally winds down. The US Department of Energy has funded the US company TerraPower (which has Bill Gates as a major investor) to build a demonstration plant of its sodium-cooled Natrium reactor in Wyoming by 2030.
Nuclear waste not, want not
Waste is one area where the new designs really see some significant improvements, says Giovannini. “None of the reactors have entirely solved the problem of nuclear waste, but they do provide some significant solutions in terms of quantity,” she says. The spent fuel from traditional light water reactors needs to be buried in special repositories for hundreds of thousands of years, because of the production of long-lived radioactive byproducts. Some Gen IV reactors, on the other hand, can transform spent fuel into more fissile isotopes and use it for further fission reactions. This can improve efficiency and produce waste that need only be stored for hundreds of years.
Not everyone, though, thinks all these systems are as shiny as they seem. In 2021, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report entitled “‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better,” in which they highlighted issues with safety, sustainability and nuclear proliferation. They concluded that nearly all the Gen IV reactor types “fail to provide significant enough improvements over [light water reactors] to justify their considerable risks.”
The report was criticized by some for being ideologically antinuclear, says Giovannini. But, she says, “it was very fair” to point out that new tech comes with new worries. Liquid salt, the report pointed out, is corrosive; liquid sodium metal can burst into flame when in contact with water or air. High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, the report concluded, while tolerant of high temperatures, are “far from meltdown-proof, as some claim.”
Hot idea
Many of these Gen IV systems offer another key benefit: Their higher temperatures can provide not just electricity but also useful heat. This could be used in many industrial processes, such as the production of steel, cement and fertilizer, which currently burn a lot of fossil fuels in their furnaces.
“That heat is pretty much for free,” says Vetter, who sees a particular utility for nuclear heat in desalination, getting clean drinking water out of saltwater as is done at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. Indeed, X-energy, a leading US Gen IV nuclear company funded by the DOE, has partnered with Dow chemical company to build its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at a Dow chemical production site by 2030. Morgan, though, thinks that most industries will balk at the set-up costs.
Even if Gen IV reactors turn out to be technically superior, though, it may be decades before they can be thoroughly tested, passed by regulators and built at commercial scale. With little time to spare in the fight against climate change, the world might be better off simply ramping up old reactor designs that are already proven, says Esam Hussein, a retired nuclear engineer from the University of Regina, Canada.“We have the operating experience, we have the regulatory framework,” he says. “If the goal is to fight climate change, why don’t you go with the devil you know?”
In response to why we need a devil at all, many are quick to point out that no energy solution is problem-free, including renewables. Giovannini says she agrees with the nuclear industry’s criticism that we have “jumped on renewables in a very uncritical way.” Wind and solar require electronics and battery banks to store their energy; these in turn need elements like lithium and cobalt that can come with environmental and social justice issues from mining. “Nothing is 100 percent safe,” says Vetter.
It is hard for many to swallow data, assurances and statistics about nuclear, given its history and the huge amounts of money at stake. “I think the nuclear industry is selling a bunch of bullshit most of the time,” says Giovannini, who has been critical of how the industry deals with public concerns. But her own main worry about nuclear is “they’re moving too slow.” If companies like Ultra Safe, X-Energy, TerraPower and others are going to help fight climate change with Gen IV technologies and fleets of small reactors, she and others say, they’re going to have to ramp up fast.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 20, 2024, to change a name: Granger Morgan was referred to as Granger instead of Morgan in one reference. It was updated on March 21, 2024, to correct the specialty of Esam Hussein. He is a retired nuclear engineer, not a retired nuclear physicist.
Persuading Southern autoworkers to join a union remains one of the U.S. labor movement’s most enduring challenges, despite persistent efforts by the United Auto Workers union to organize this workforce.
But after the UAW pulled off its most successful strike in a generation against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, through which it won higher pay and better benefits for its members in 2023, the union is trying again to win over Southern autoworkers.
Based on my five decades of experience as a union organizer and labor historian, I anticipate that, recent momentum aside, the UAW will face stiff resistance from Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and the other big foreign automakers that operate in the South. The pushback is also coming from Southern politicians, many of whom have expressed concern that UAW success would undermine the region’s carefully crafted approach to economic development.
After the region’s formerly robust textile industry imploded in the 1980s and 1990s because of an influx of cheap imports, Southern business and political leaders revived the region’s manufacturing base by successfully recruiting foreign automakers.
The strategy of those leaders reflects what the Business Council of Alabama has described as the “perfect three-legged stool for economic development.” It consists of “an eager and trainable workforce with a work ethic unparalleled anywhere in the nation,” accompanied by a “low-cost and business-friendly economic climate, and the lack of labor union activity and participation.”
The prospect of a low-wage and reliable workforce has lured the likes of Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Kia, Honda, Volkswagen and Hyundai to the South in recent decades.
Although many of those companies negotiate constructively with unions on their home turf, the lack of union membership and the protections that go with it have proved a draw for them in the United States.
As journalist Harold Meyerson has noted, these foreign automakers embraced the opportunity to “slum” in America and “do things they would never think of doing at home.”
The absence of union representation is a major reason why.
Less than 5% of workers in six Southern states are union members, and only Alabama and Mississippi approach union membership levels above 7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
One way automotive employers in the South have blocked unions is by portraying them as outdated institutions whose bloated contracts and rigid work rules destroy jobs by making domestic auto companies uncompetitive.
Automotive leaders in the South argue the region has developed an alternative labor relations model that provides management with flexibility, offers wages and benefits superior to what local workers have earned previously and frees employees from any subordination to union directives.
Southern automakers also draw on another powerful resource in resisting the UAW: public intervention by top elected officials.
In 2014, when the UAW attempted to organize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga. Bob Corker, Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator and a former mayor of Chattanooga, weighed in as voting commenced.
Corker claimed he had received a pledge from Volkswagen’s management to expand production in Chattanooga if workers voted against the union.
Three years later, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant similarly urged Nissan workers to reject the UAW.
“If you want to take away your job, if you want to end manufacturing as we know it in Mississippi, just start expanding unions,” Bryant said in 2017.
She then asked workers: “Do you want continued opportunity and success the Alabama way? Or do you want out-of-state special interests telling Alabama how to do business?”
Unions “have crippled and distorted the progress and prosperity of industries and cities in other states,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster declared in his Jan. 24, 2024, State of the State address. He then issued an ominous call: “We will fight” the UAW’s labor organizers “all the way to the gates of hell. And we will win.”
Although these arguments from anti-union politicians haven’t changed much over the years, the context certainly has.
The UAW’s big wins on pay and benefits resulting from its 2023 strike against General Motors, Ford and Stellantis have increased its clout and credibility.
Many automakers with a U.S. workforce not covered by the UAW – including Volkswagen, Honda, Hyundai and other foreign transplants – responded by raising pay at their Southern plants. The union justifiably describes those raises as a “UAW bump.”
The UAW will presumably cite these pay hikes in its outreach to workers at Tesla and other nonunion companies involved in electric vehicle and battery production in which the industry is investing heavily.
“Nonunion autoworkers are being left behind,” the UAW’s recruiting website warns. “Are you ready to stand up and win your fair share?”
The pitch continues: “It’s time for nonunion autoworkers to join the UAW and win economic justice at Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Subaru, Volkswagen, Mazda, Rivian, Lucid, Volvo and beyond.”
Some Southern autoworkers, meanwhile, have been expressing concerns over scheduling, safety, two-tier wage systems and workloads that they believe a union could help resolve.
It’s also clear they’ve been emboldened by the gains they have seen UAW members make.
Southern autoworkers applaud the union-organizing drive underway at a VW factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Revving up
The UAW’s campaign is just starting to rev up.
In accordance with its “30-50-70” strategy, the union is announcing the share of workers who have signed union cards in stages. Once it hits 30% at a factory, the UAW will announce publicly that an organizing campaign is underway. At the 50% mark, it will hold a public rally for workers that includes their neighbors and families, as well as UAW President Shawn Fain.
Once it gains support from 70% of a plant’s workers, the UAW says it will seek voluntary recognition by management.
A recent National Labor Relations Board ruling provides unions with additional leverage in this process. If management refuses to recognize the union’s request, the employer would then be required to seek an NLRB representation election.
To win, unions need a majority of those voting. Under the new rule, if management is found to have interfered with workers’ rights during the election process, it could then be required to bargain with the union.
I believe that the stakes are high for all workers, not just those in the auto industry.
As D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here, a union that represents workers in a wide range of occupations, recently observed: “If you change the South, you change America.”
Federal student loan payments resumed last October after a 3-year pause during the COVID-19 pandemic. Five months prior, the national COVID-19 emergency ended and Congress passed legislation preventing additional extensions of payment pause, and student loan interest resumed in September 2023. Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal wrote a blog post that an unprecedented challenge was presented with more than 28 million borrowers returning to repayment. He said most had already made their first payments, while others would need more time and might be confused or overwhelmed about their options -- and supporting them would be a top priority.
The bottom line is that students need to understand the terms of their loans and the options available to them for repayment. Institutions can -- and have a duty to -- fill this gap.
Students Overwhelmingly Lack Financial Literacy
Human capital theory (HCT) provides a foundation that is essential in understanding why specific programs are necessary in meeting the challenges of future student debt management. As it relates to education, HCT proposes that education increases the productivity and earnings of individuals; therefore, education is an investment. Attending college is seen as a long-term investment in human capital because it generally provides individuals with economic benefits and impacts positive economic growth for society.
In fact, this investment is crucial for students -- their development of human capital is considered improving productive capacities, which includes possessing knowledge, skills, and talents. Ideally, when students decide to attend college, they take on the responsibility to investigate and understand all possible benefits with regard to taking on student loan debt. They should recognize the positive outcomes of the short- and long-term cost benefit of student loans: an education first, then earnings from a career that allows the ability to repay loans. Yet, there is alarmingly little financial education provided by institutions to help fulfill the financial wellness expectations described in HCT.
In order to comprehensively apply HCT to the benefit of college graduates with federal loan debt, a dedicated financial literacy department needs to be required for all institutions that process federal financial aid. Research on financial wellness by the Department of Education reported that close to 75% of students were stressed by their finances in general and over 50% of students worry about having enough to pay for school.
In addition, many students had never taken a personal finance class or workshop while in college. With federal student loan debt totaling over $1 billion and many students having little or no experience managing their day-to-day costs and finances, there has never been a more appropriate time in higher education to create financial literacy programs that will meet both the needs of students and institutions. While attending a recent career fair for new college graduates, it was surprising to learn of the overwhelming lack in knowledge of income-based payment plan options that are available to students with federal student loan debt.
Having more than a decade's experience leading college financial aid departments and spearheading several initiatives to increase students' financial literacy, I can share some of the best practices I have seen benefit both students and institutions.
How Colleges Can Help
An effective financial literacy program involves establishing a dedicated unit to teach and partner with students throughout their college careers and beyond. To start, institutions may want to create and host a mandatory group or individual financial literacy meeting for incoming first-year students on techniques for managing costs of attendance, financial aid loans, and personal finances. Each subsequent year, it is helpful to host mandatory ongoing financial literacy and wellness seminars held specifically for each college year cohort. Finally, prior to graduation, a dedicated senior-year debt management seminar, with a focus on debt repayment strategies, can help prepare all potential graduates who have federal student loan debt.
The most unique, innovative, and student-service-centered aspect that I have seen from newly formed financial literacy departments is continued assistance to students in their first year following graduation (at no cost to them). It is common for graduates to pay for the services of financial advisors or consultants to help manage their financial planning and wellness. Alternatively, some financial literacy departments provide this valuable service and consulting as part of the continuing student experience lifecycle.
Staff can continuously review and advise graduates on their loan repayment plan, making recommendations if they feel a change in repayment plan is the best fit.
Last but not least, the financial literacy staff may benefit from being trained and licensed to advise on important financial decisions on life events such as home mortgages, managing family finances, and continued financial wellness education.
Final Words
Institutions need to consider their ethical and educational duty to extend their mission of educating students post-graduation. Not only does it benefit the institution in areas such as managing Cohort Default Rate (CDR) performance, but it also promotes a stronger connection with the student population and helps generate continuing student service satisfaction. Financial literacy departments are valuable investments for all colleges and universities to consider in order to provide their students and graduates with an organized and systematic roadmap for managing student loan debt.
This article is republished from HigherEdJobs® under a Creative Commons license.
The four-day week emerged in the 90s as a political and economic demand for a more equal division of work. The idea was to reduce the number of hours worked so that more people can access employment. This approach, developed in 1993 by French economist Pierre Larrouturou, was tested in 1996 with the de Robien law on the organisation of working hours. In France, business leaders such as Antoine Riboud, CEO of the multinational food-products firm Danone, championed the idea as a way of boosting recruitment. However, the law was repealed in the early 2000s with the labour reform that introduced the 35-hour week. Elsewhere, in Germany, Volkswagen adopted the four-day week in 1994 to save 30,000 jobs, only to abandon it in 2006.
The Covid crisis and its associated lockdowns have brought this debate back into the spotlight. The widespread adoption of working from home, the use of new technologies and the increase in flexibility have profoundly transformed the way we work. This period has also reinforced employees’ desire for a better work-life balance. As a result, 56% of British employees would accept to earn less money in exchange for more free time.
Against this backdrop, the debate on the four-day week is resurfacing. Countries in Asia and Oceania are looking at ways to organise their workforces in order to reengage their employees. In New Zealand, the government introduced a four-day week at the end of the pandemic to boost productivity and improve work-life balance. In Japan, several companies have also come on board, including Hitachi and Microsoft. This measure, presented as a means of combating overwork culture, is also an opportunity to significantly improve productivity (by 40% in the case of Microsoft).
This reform can take various shapes – each of them presenting specific challenges.
A four-day week or a week squeezed into four days?
The first approach is the most popular: an unchanged number of working hours, concentrated over four days. This is the model implemented by Belgium and the Nordic countries. In autumn 2022, Belgium passed a law on the four-day week, called the “deal for employment”: employees can work four days without any reduction in salary because their weekly working time remains the same. In Italy, the Intesa Sanpaolo bank is doing the same. In France, an attempt to do so was proposed in March 2023 to the employees of Urssaf Picardie, but was a complete failure. The cause: parenthood. Long days no longer allow parents to take their children to and from school.
This is a new form of temporal flexibility, without any reduction in working hours. As economist Éric Heyer points out:
“We shouldn’t confuse the ‘four-day’ week, which reduces working time, with the ‘week in four days’, which compresses it.”
The challenge, then, is to work differently so that the quality of work does not suffer as a result of intensification.
Working less, working better
The second approach is the true ideal of the four-day week, namely the 32-hour week: shorter working hours thanks to increased productivity. It has been implemented in Southern Europe (Spain, Portugal).
This formula is based on the idea of maintaining work productivity by identifying and reducing unproductive time, streamlining certain processes, notably reporting and participation in meetings. Working less, yes, but above all working better. It would in fact limit everything considered superfluous. That said, putting the organisation on a diet reduces its ability to adapt to rapid changes in its environment. For example, we now know that “down times” facilitate the exchange of information between teams.
This approach is deeply embedded in the idea that technology will compensate for any loss of productivity, a recurring theme since the publication of The End of Work in 1995 by American essayist Jeremy Rifkin. The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has brought the concept back to the forefront. Bill Gates even talks about the imminent arrival of the three-day week.
Since the advent of the industrial world, organisations have constantly sought to optimise working time. For many years, it simply kept pace with the production line. Working time and time at work were perfectly synonymous. Today, we don’t have to go to the office to work: work has moved into our personal spaces. Working time has become detached from office time. With the four-day week, the aim is to frame work in terms of time rather than space. Sarah Proust, an expert associated with the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, explains:
“What is at issue here is the organisation and distribution of work, rather the place we intend to give to work in society.”
Toward a new work paradigm?
Instead of focusing on the volume of hours, shouldn’t we be talking about the very nature of work? In the words of economist Timothée Parrique, we need to stop predicting the future of work with ideas like the four-day week, and start inventing the work of the future.
A growing body of research, notably in the wake of anthropologist David Graeber, is highlighting the loss of meaning at work, the rise of “bullshit jobs” and the “revolt of the top of the class”, to borrow the title of journalist Jean-Laurent Cassely’s book.
Unfortunately, reorganising working hours will not be enough to reengage one’s workforce. Working time is above all a “hygiene factor”, as psychologist Frederick Irving Herzberg explains. It cannot deliver the motivation so hoped-for by managers. It can only temper employee dissatisfaction. As a source of personal fulfilment and satisfaction, highers-up need to activate genuine “motivational factors”, such as by valuing the work accomplished, employees’ autonomy, or making work tasks more interesting.
Perhaps we need to create new utopias of work along the lines of Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Ernest Callenbach’s book (1975) that imagined three West Coast states seceding from the USA to establish a radically ecological way of life. In it, Callenbach imagines a new model of society where people only work 22 hours a week. This utopia depicts economies where a large proportion of the available hours are devoted to social, political, cultural and environmental activities. Ecotopia advocates personal and collective fulfilment before individual success. Businesses are self-managed, public transport is free, education and health are accessible to all, criminal violence is absent, universal income is in force and recycling, sobriety and degrowth are the rule.
Callenbach wanted to give us a glimpse of a world he believed to be better, not only for the environment, but also for the individual balance of each person. As we live longer than ever, and as work occupies less time in our lives, we need to imagine, not a new way of working, but a new way of living.
This is the year you can finally buy a car on Amazon. Well, one kind. Eventually.
On Nov. 16, 2023, at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Amazon and Hyundai made a big announcement: Starting sometime in 2024, a new pilot program would let shoppers not only browse Hyundai cars on Amazon.com but pay for them, too.
As a professor of marketing, I followed this story closely. “Customers will be able to buy new vehicles directly on Amazon,” an executive for the online retail giant said during the announcement, drawing cheers from the audience.
But that framing may be just a tiny bit too simplistic, I feel. The real story is more complex – and more interesting.
A visit to the digital showroom
It’s still not yet possible for a regular person to buy a car on Amazon – I know, because I’ve tried. Amazon and Hyundai have not publicly announced the date the pilot will start, and they haven’t responded to my inquiries.
But in the meantime, you can still go some way toward getting your new hybrid via the online store.
Right now, if you open Amazon.com and search “Hyundai,” you’ll see Hyundai’s webpage on Amazon.com as the first search result. You may click on this webpage, enter your ZIP code, and see new Hyundais that are for sale at nearby participating dealers.
The current system lets you select model, trim and color, choose between financing and leasing, and estimate a monthly payment.
But as of this date – Jan. 26, 2024 – you can’t actually check out with a car in your cart. Instead, once you’ve chosen the car you want, Amazon will direct you to a local dealer so you can choose financing/leasing and pay for the car at the dealership.
What’s more, Amazon says that pricing details on the site are for illustration, and that “final pricing details are determined at Hyundai dealership.” In other words, Amazon provides car buyers with information, but it doesn’t let them actually buy a car.
As I explain below, adding the ability to check out would be a big deal. And that’s what Amazon has said it’s about to do.
But wait: Why can’t I buy a car on Amazon already? I can buy everything else, right?
In the U.S., states generally require legacy automakers to sell their cars through franchised dealers. Some states have allowed makers of electric vehicles, such as Tesla, to sell directly to consumers.
To comply with the franchise dealership laws, Amazon can’t list vehicles for sale the way it lists, say, books or socks. Instead, it needs to partner with dealers.
So, Amazon’s plan is to expand its digital Hyundai showroom to include 18 Hyundai dealers in five states. That will allow nearby buyers to not only browse their current inventory but also pay for a new vehicle.
That is, while a buyer will pay for a vehicle and choose financing or leasing options at Amazon, a local dealer will be the seller of record, with Amazon serving as a sales channel.
By honoring franchise laws while spreading awareness of dealers’ inventory and providing shoppers a convenient way to buy new vehicles, Amazon has been remarkably clever.
And while this pilot will start with Hyundai, it likely won’t stop there. Amazon has said that at some point – it hasn’t announced when – it plans to expand the program to include other auto brands.
How 2024 will change how we buy cars – a little
So, if reports are to be believed, at some point in 2024, Amazon will let customers check out a Hyundai just like they check out a bottle of shampoo.
This could make a lot of people happy. It would tap into a growing segment of buyers who trust Amazon, prefer to complete paperwork online and don’t want to haggle with a dealer. It could also draw more buyers to participating dealers, boosting their sales.
But I’m skeptical that this “prime” opportunity will transform things, at least at first.
To start, Amazon will sell only new Hyundais. Buyers who want to compare a Hyundai with a rival model will be out of luck. Amazon also won’t sell used vehicles or allow trade-ins. That means a lot of consumer demand would be left unmet.
Auto dealers might also hesitate to work with Amazon. For one thing, they would miss the chance to form relationships with buyers – and the opportunity to upsell them.
But either way, it may not be long before you can add toiletries, kitchen supplies and a new Hyundai to your Amazon cart.
