Many rural areas through out the United States have problems with employment and the economies that are supported by them.  There a many issues that effect employment in rural areas.  Burns, Oregon is an example of some of the issues that effect rural job markets.  Burns fits the definitions of a rural town.  There are a few definitions of what a rural town is.  One is people living in the country or related to farming.  Another definition is related to the number of people living in the area.  Rural is an area having fewer that two thousand five hundred people.  There are three main issues that effect rural job markets.  These are industry loss, out migration, and transportation issues.  I will first address the issue with transportation to and from rural areas.

          Many rural areas are not in metropolitan areas.  This creates a strain on transporting anything.  Many rural areas are off the beaten path so to speak.  There aren’t major roads going to them and from them.  In other cases, there are roads, but they may not be well traveled roads.  There isn’t train transportation in some areas and planes aren’t in every area either.  This leaves the main source of transportation to be the main way to move around in rural areas.  This has effects on the types of jobs and where people can go for jobs.  People can only go as far as they are able to drive to go to work.  This also affects people being able to come to the rural areas from other communities.  Things being shipped in and out of the community are obviously effected the by capabilities of their transportation infrastructure.  Burns is a prime example of this.

          The road to burns is long, twisted, and bumpy.  For part of the year the road is closed because of weather issues.  This isn’t very good for people shipping around the area.  Things can’t always get in or out of the area.  With the lack of trains and planes, there is a sole reliability on the roads.  This effects people like the ranchers who ship out cattle.  They can’t ship out the cattle by train so they transport them by truck to a train.  When the roads are bad, people can’t come through the town.  The roads don’t stop people from leaving the town though.

          The out-migration of people from these rural areas has become a problem for employers and the community at large.  Many people move out of the communities to work.  They don’t like the lack of jobs and leave for good in many cases.  This in turn decreases the labor market in the area.  The decreased labor market then adds to lack of new business that develops in the areas.  The lack of new jobs then circles back to the labor market leaving to find work.

          This same effect happens in Burns.  It starts when people are youth in this community.  Many kids are encouraged to leave the area once they have completed their education.  This removes a lot of the future workforce from the area.  The labor force is shrunk by the people who are older also leaving to find work.  Part of this can also be attributed to the lack of things for them to do.  There isn’t much for people to do who are older in the area.  This and the lack of job prospects take away a lot of this portion of the job market.  One key factor that affects job markets the most in rural areas is the lack of industry in these areas.

          The lack of industry greatly hurts rural job markets.  In many rural towns, a single industry is the major employer for the area.  This single industry, a lot of times, is part of the reason the rural town it is in exists.  When one of these industries ends, the whole area feels the effects of it.  There is a large influx of people into the job market.  There is no place for most of them in the job market there.  Many of these people have to leave and find employment elsewhere.