Last year, before the COVID-19 pandemic, Matt Murphy started his first salaried job, scheduling and placing on-air ads for a state-wide commercial broadcasting company based in Charleston, West Virginia. Before landing full-time employment, Murphy worked as a substitute teacher, bartender and part-time radio announcer. But the transition to regular full-time hours has not translated into a real change in his lifestyle. In his mid-30s, he still felt he couldn’t afford to live on his own. 

 “I am finally at a point where I can count on the same amount [in each paycheck]. And it’s just not enough. There’s no way I could afford my own place and a car payment,” he said. Instead, Murphy lives with his grandmother in Cross Lanes and makes the 12-mile bus ride to work in Charleston a few times a week. 

Matt Murphy spent years working three jobs, as a substitute teacher, bartender and radio announcer, to try to make ends meet. Photo: Roger May/100 Days in Appalachia

That financial strain is worse since the pandemic began in March, when his company furloughed staff, translating to a 10 percent pay cut. Some experts say that 28 percent of U.S. workers—roughly 46 million Americans—have been laid off or had their hours reduced through furloughs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Workforce reductions like furloughs don’t show up in official unemployment statistics, but for many like Murphy who may have pivoted away from flexible income in favor of a regular paycheck, that sudden instability can prove to be just as disruptive.

Mayors in 11 U.S. cities responded to rampant national job loss in late June, agreeing to launch universal basic income experiments in the next year. Three of those are in the South: Shreveport, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; and Atlanta, Georgia. 

UBI—unconditional, government subsidized, regular cash payments for adults — has been studied as a potential part of a strategy to reduce poverty in the U.S. since the 1970s. In Appalachia, UBI is often discussed as a post-coal economic transition strategy. But Murphy’s story shows that workers outside the coal industry are hurting too. “I know people who have had to get forbearances on their mortgages because that 10 percent cut made things really tough financially,” Murphy said.

The $1,200 stimulus payment from the federal CARES act helped, but it does nothing to solve the immediate challenges he faced even before the pay cut. In Appalachia, unemployment rates have reached nearly 20 percent in some areas. “You know,” he told me during a phone call from the radio station where he works. “Why not have something that’s just on a regular basis?”

What is UBI?

The first round of CARES act assistance—billions of dollars spent on, among other things, relief for renters, stimulus payments, and extended unemployment benefits, expired on July 31. Millions of Americans now must grapple with what comes next.

As the nation watches Congress wrangle over a second aid package and COVID-19 infections spike in parts of the nation, the long-term decline of local economies in Appalachia brings the current crisis into sharp relief.

Jobs in the coal industry have decreased steadily since the 1950s, even as production rose due to mechanization and strip-mining. In 2018, less than 14,000 people worked in West Virginia as coal miners. About 50,000 coal miners work in the U.S. today.

Coal piles sit along Route 60 just outside of Charleston, West Virginia. Photo: Roger May/100 Days in Appalachia

In eastern Kanawha County, mounds of coal sit along the railroad tracks, poking out above the treeline. The demand for coal was already predicted to drop by 14 percent this year; now some experts say it could decrease by 25 percent. 

UBI could help workers in the manufacturing sector get by as automation and robots increasingly replace blue-collar jobs. In a way, Appalachia serves as a bellwether for the nation. The U.S. economy could shed 1.5 million manufacturing jobs by 2030 according to some projections. Coal workers are among the first to be replaced—and the first to test drive larger-scale government interventions. 

Dr. Caroline West is an assistant professor of cultural studies at George Mason University in Richmond, Virginia. She has written about UBI as a tool to mitigate the decline of the coal industry in central Appalachia. 

She thinks UBI could provide people with the ability to make decisions about how to improve their lives in economically-depressed areas like Appalachia. It is an important distinction from other types of limited government-sponsored efforts of the past, like President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program of the 1960s. “I am much more interested in how people, you know, can create their own kind of initiatives,” she said. 

She argues that because Appalachian coalfield communities have historically relied on outside financial capital to drive local economies and make up for extractive labor and resource practices—either from coal companies or the federal government—that Appalachian people have also been stripped of their power of economic choice. 

West cites a 2017 Al Jazeera video series that profiled small business owners Brad Shepherd and Daryl Royse as an example of how the “bootstraps” mentality continues to further drain local capital in other industries as well. The couple lived and worked in Lexington, Kentucky to save the funds needed to open Heritage Kitchen in Whitesburg, Shepherd’s hometown. UBI, argues West, would have made the couple less reliant on “outside (or absentee) capital” to start their business locally. 

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The idea of UBI is not new. The U.S. social security system, which ensures a basic income for seniors, grew out of another economic crisis: the Great Depression. Some experts say unemployment jumped to as high as 25 percent during the Depression-era 1930s. Similarly, in April of this year, unemployment in the United States went from 4.4 percent to 14.4 percent, the largest one-month jump in U.S. history. 

Like the Great Depression, the coronavirus pandemic may make gaps in the social safety net more visible, Richard Stafford, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies, also at George Mason University said. “Something like coronavirus could trigger people to say ‘hey maybe business as usual isn’t working perfectly if it’s so vulnerable to crisis, What could we do differently?’” 

But Stafford remains skeptical. He thinks that there is more political will to pass emergency-driven payments than there is to pass UBI legislation into law. ”I don’t know that a relief payment is a vehicle to a universal basic income,” he said. 

UBI in Action

In theory, UBI enjoy