Much of Southside Virginia has more jobs available than workers available, but those jobs and workers are often misaligned in terms of qualifications, creating surpluses of workers in some sectors, particularly manufacturing, and huge numbers of vacancies in health care.
Those are some of the key findings in a report recently conducted for GO Virginia Region 3, the economic development region that stretches from Patrick County east to Brunswick County and north to Buckingham and Cumberland counties to form a triangle in the southern part of Virginia. The region includes Danville and Martinsville but not Lynchburg. There are other parts of Southside that aren’t in this region, and there may be some localities in the west that consider themselves more part of Southwest than Southside. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll use “Southside” as the shorthand for this particular region because the general public understands that term better than it does “GO Virginia Region 3.”
The report, conducted by Chmura Economics & Analytics of Richmond, found the region gaining high-wage jobs but with an economy still weighted toward lower-wage ones. The report documents a huge and growing need for health care-related jobs, particularly nurses. Finally, the report finds that the average living wage for many adults in Southside is lower than the proposed minimum wage that the Democrats in the General Assembly would like to enact, which raises both economic and political questions.
While these findings pertain to just one part of Virginia, the report contains insights that may well apply to other parts of the state, particularly rural ones. Here’s a summary:
Southside Virginia has a mismatch between workers available and jobs available
This shouldn’t surprise us. We’ve seen similar data out of Northern Virginia that shows the federal workers who have lost their jobs don’t always match up well with the private sector jobs that are available. While the federal government is a unique employer, the overall situation of workers and jobs that aren’t aligned isn’t.
This report says that in early 2025, there were 14,483 available workers across Region 3 — defined as those who are unemployed or just entering the workforce. Meanwhile, there were 15,383 jobs unfilled. In theory, that means each of those workers could find a job, with 900 jobs left to fill, but the reality is more complicated because of those mismatches. The sector with the most jobs available has the hardest time finding workers because there aren’t enough people skilled in that profession: health care.
Southside needs more than 3,400 health care workers
Health care has the biggest mismatch, with a relatively small number of available workers for a large and growing number of jobs available. The report finds that Region 3 has 434 health care workers seeking employment — but the region has 3,854 health care jobs available. That leaves a deficit of 3,420 workers. The deficit might actually be higher because there may be further mismatches within the health care sector — a physical therapist wouldn’t fit into a nursing position, for instance, or vice versa.
This deficit is not unusual across Virginia, altough it is more pronounced in Southside. Gov. Glenn Youngkin recently posted a chart about 255,000 jobs available in Virginia. Of those, 32,246 were in health care. Statewide, health care jobs account for 13% of the state’s job vacancies. In Southside, they account for 25% of the job vacancies.
We’ll come back to some of the other mismatches between workers available and jobs available, but while we’re on the subject of health care workers, there’s more data to look at.
The health care job openings in Southside have nearly tripled over the past eight years
From June 2017 to June 2025, the number of health care openings in the region has grown by 2.6 times.
Southside is not alone. Health care jobs are a growth sector nationally, driven by demography. We’re an aging society, and the older we get, the more health care needs we have. Rural areas tend to be older than metro areas, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see the demand for health care positions increase so much.
Still, this demand for health care workers dwarfs all others in Region 3. The number of health care openings is more than twice the next biggest set of job listings — the retail trade.
Furthermore, the available retail positions have shrunk by 27.2% over the past eight years. But health care openings are growing, and at a faster rate than almost anything else. That brings us to this:
The nature of Southside’s job needs is changing
Eight years ago, the single biggest category of job openings in Southside was in retail — 29.5% of the open jobs. Health care was further back, at 18.0%. The third biggest sector in search of jobs then was in accommodation and food service — hotels and restaurants — which accounted for 12.5% of the openings. No other job sector was in double digits.
Fast forward to this year. The overall number of job openings has increased, and 83.5% of those have come in health care. That’s where the job growth is (or would be if those positions could be filled).
This year, 35.3% of the open jobs in Southside are in health care, about double the share eight years ago. Retail has shrunk by about half, to 15.8%. Hotels and restaurants have slipped to 10.9%.
Almost half those health care openings are for registered nurses
Of those open health care positions, nearly half are for registered nurses — 48.2%. The second-biggest need in the health care sector is for physical therapists (13.2%), followed by speech-language pathologists (12.2%).
The demand for registered nurses also explains part of the reason why wages in Southside are rising, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Health care is driving the economic growth, not manufacturing
Manufacturing occupies an outsized amount of economic attention. Politicians from both parties love to talk about how they’re going to revive manufacturing. That’s a particularly attractive message in Southside, a part of the state once dotted with mill towns.
However, this report paints a more complicated picture of manufacturing’s role in the Southside economy, particularly in terms of its standing vis-a-vis health care.
The region now has more health care jobs (20,949) than manufacturing jobs (17,231), with retail jobs third (14,084).
Overall, manufacturing jobs pay an average higher wage than health care jobs ($61,245 vs. $48,892). However, of the manufacturing jobs that are actually open, health care jobs pay better — and there are far more of them.
Of the open positions in Southside, only 5.1% are in manufacturing. Of the sectors with vacancies, it only ranks sixth. By contrast, 27.6% of the job vacancies in Southside are in health care, with sales jobs coming in a distant second at 8.8%.
Of the manufacturing jobs available in June 2025, the single biggest group — 26.9% — paid in the $15 to $17.99 per hour range. The second biggest group, 21.6%, paid in the $18 to $19.99 range. That’s nearly half between $15 and $19.99 per hour.
Of the health care jobs available, the single biggest group — 39.2% — paid in the $30 to $39.99 range. The next biggest group — 24.3% — were in the next-highest pay range, $40 per hour and up. Together, that’s 63.5% paying $30 per hour or more. Only 16.9% of the much smaller number of manufacturing jobs paid in that range.
Furthermore, the report forecasts that health care will lead job growth in Southside over the next five years, with manufacturing falling to fourth.
The report sees a demand for 10,921 health care workers in the coming years — 17.3% of the new jobs in Southside. Hotels and restaurants will need 8,727 — 13.8% of the new jobs. Retail comes third, with a need for 8,739 jobs — another 13.8% of the total. Manufacturing comes fourth, at 7,940 jobs — 12.6%.
The economic challenge is that those hotel/restaurant and retail jobs don’t pay nearly as much — $23,362 in the former, $31,465 in the latter. If you add in recreation jobs ($27,833), then 29.2% of the region’s job growth is forecasted to be in the three lowest-paid job sectors.
Southside has a lot of unemployed manufacturing workers
While health care has more jobs than workers, manufacturing is just the opposite: It has more workers than jobs.
The report said Southside has 1,186 available production workers — that’s clinical language for unemployed. They are chasing 359 jobs, leaving a “labor surplus” of 827 people. Of 22 job categories listed, no other category had that many people “available.” The size of that available pool of manufacturing workers was twice as big as anything else.
This is a statistical picture of the economic dislocation across Southside following the demise of traditional industries such as textiles and furniture.
There are two ways to look at this situation. One way is to say there are a lot of people who may be waiting for a manufacturing renaissance that may never come, at least not on the scale they need. The second way is to say that this is an available workforce that represents a sales opportunity: Any manufacturing company that’s looking at the region won’t have to worry about finding a workforce; it’s already there and waiting.
The percentage of job openings in higher-paid jobs is increasing
The whole point of the GO Virginia initiative has been to create higher-wage jobs in each part of the state — a worthy goal. This report says that it seems to be succeeding in Southside.
“In June 2017, job postings were more concentrated in lower-wage sectors than in June 2025,” the report says. That’s because of those stats I cited above. In 2017, the single-biggest demand was in retail jobs; now it’s in health care, and health care pays better. “This suggests that the GO Virginia 3 region has made progress on transitioning from lower-wage, lower-skilled jobs to higher-wage, higher-skilled jobs,” the report says.
The question is how much of that has happened naturally — we need more health care workers because we’re getting older, not because somebody lured some big health care factory — and how much is the result of government initiatives.
I’d contend that all of these stats have statewide implications, but this one really does:
The average living wage in Southside is lower than the proposed state minimum wage
The cost of living in Southside is low. In every category that goes into calculating a “living wage” — child care, food, health care, housing, taxes, transportation — Southside comes in lower than both the state and national averages, the report says.
Accordingly, its living wage is lower, too.
A living wage is defined as the ability to meet “basic living expenses.”
The report calculates that the average living wage in Southside is $14.56 per hour. Virginia’s minimum wage rose to $12.77 on Jan. 1, but Democrats in the General Assembly would like to raise it to $15 per hour by 2028, with increases after that tied to the cost of living.
The main argument for raising the minimum wage to $15 is that, in many places, the current rate of $12.77 is not a living wage. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator estimates that in Arlington, the living wage for a single adult requires $19.46 per hour for two working adults with no children or $30.54 for one adult living alone with no children.
A minimum wage increase to $15 per hour, which would put some of the more expensive parts of the state closer to a living wage, would put some Southside workers even higher above it. By that measure, a minimum wage increase would be an economic boon to some Southside workers. On the other hand, the question is how many employers could afford that, and what kind of inflationary spiral that might set in motion.
For those curious about this, I refer you to this chart in the report. The “average living wage” is something of a misnomer because there are multiple “average living wage” depending on family size and composition. This report calculated the figure for 12 different types of families. Depending on the family, the “average living wage” in Southside actually varies from $9.42 per hour for two adults with no children to $32.10 for one adult with three children.
And then there’s this: About 90% of the job openings in Southside are already at $15 per hour or more; it’s those 10% who would get a raise from an increase in the minimum wage (assuming their job didn’t get automated or eliminated after that). Whether that increase truly lifts them into a living wage, or puts them higher than one, would depend on their family type.
You can also see in this the upward lift of wages over the past eight years, which helps support the point above that the region’s jobs are coming more in higher-wage positions (thanks largely to health care).
What about other regions?
The GO Virginia program is supposed to allow different regions to tailor their own initiatives. What Southside needs may not be what the Shenandoah Valley needs, and so forth. That said, I’d sure be curious to see numbers like this for all the other parts of the state.
If someone somewhere wants to take that as a hint, please do.
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