From Coal Mining to Data Mining: Rusty Justice Leads Appalachian Innovation

It was never a hard decision for Rusty Justice when the coal industry began to show serious signs of sliding. Rather than obsess on the end of an economic, regional and cultural identity, he looked to the future. Always an entrepreneur, he soon found opportunity in a workforce that was highly skilled, disciplined and capable of adapting to new technologies.

In 2014, Justice and his business partner Lynn Parish established Bit Source in Pikeville, Kentucky, the “center of Central Appalachia,” as he calls it. The company since its creation has had an ambitious yet realistic goal: to reskill and upskill former coal miners in new positions in the digital economy. And with Justice at the helm, Bit Source has begun preparing Appalachia for a new future of work in a digital economy.

Who Is Rusty Justice?

Born and raised in Eastern Kentucky, Rusty Justice grew up in a culture and economy that heavily depended on coal. This generational attachment to the mines was so strong that he hauled loaded and drove his first truck of coal when he was in the eighth grade. He carried this dedication to refining coal mining processes and finding new business opportunities in the region when he got double bachelor’s degrees in engineering from the University of Kentucky.

This experience of leaving his Eastern Kentucky roots to move to Lexington proved unexpectedly challenging, though. “When I went away to UK for school in engineering,” he recalled in a 2019 interview for Appalachian Rising, “I found myself changing the way I talked. And it reminded me of all my cousins that moved to Michigan, up the Hillbilly Highway to Ohio and Michigan to work in the last collapse of the coal industry. It’s just what you did when you left here.” 

This proved to be one of many crossroads for Justice in his relationship with his community. And just like he would continue to do as a business leader and innovator, he would develop a pattern of putting his home in Pikeville first.

Predicting the Future in Appalachian Technologies

Justice had faith in the future of coal because he was uniquely aware of how much his community, like so many others, depended on it. Because of this awareness, he understood the profoundly damaging effects that coal’s decline would have on Eastern Kentucky’s local economy. 

In a profile conducted by Google, Justice reflected that “for over a hundred years coal’s been the single source of the economy here. Recently we saw almost a complete shutdown of our industry. It just went away.”

Pikeville, population 7,000, felt coal’s demise like so many other places in Appalachia. According to recent state government data on Kentucky’s labor force, this decline in coal mining jobs is still very real for residents of Eastern Kentucky today. While other districts in the Commonwealth feature an unemployment rate that hovers around 4.4%, the 23 counties that comprise Kentucky’s easternmost border carries an unemployment rate of 8.1%.

As this stark decline began to surface so prominently in his backyard, Justice began to plan. With his business partner Lynn Parish, Justice started Bit Source, a company that originally focused solely on promoting software development, to give coal miners out of work a shot at a new opportunity at making a living.

Transferred Skills, Discovered Innovation

It wasn’t difficult to convince people in his immediate orbit of how significant this initiative would be. “We really didn’t have a struggle getting people to buy into this idea,” Justice told Kentucky to the World. “As a matter of fact, we had 10 positions and we had over 900 applications.”

The overwhelming enthusiasm for these new types of jobs confirmed what Justice already knew about the region:

“It speaks to the willingness of the population in rural America to do this kind of work. It speaks to the need of these types of jobs in these types of areas. And it speaks for the capabilities of the workforce. These skills are transferable. Rural Americans can perform this work at a high level. It’s just a matter of getting the social capital in place where people understand what their options are and what is available for them.”

Justice understood that coal miners were the perfect candidates for Bit Source’s new positions in software, app and website development. “In mining, it takes attention to detail, you work collaboratively, and it’s very technologically driven,” Justice stated. “That’s also a misunderstanding about the coal industry. It’s a place for high-tech workers, they just get dirty doing high-tech.”

And just as Justice knew that coal miners could become effective programmers, he also predicted how Eastern Kentucky would be able to transition into a constantly connected economy. “As we move into a digital economy in Appalachia, we find that our ability to innovate is a strength,” Justice said. “People here are very creative, and they are able to come up with ideas and have perspectives that are really unique in the world. It’s a comparative advantage.”

As more people, especially in Appalachia, continue to gain access to and experience with digital tools, more opportunities will stimulate the region’s economy. “The great leveler of technology, of digital economies, is that it unleashes these skill sets and abilities on the world,” Justice stated. “And I think Appalachia and rural Kentucky in general has great days ahead of it.”

Many of Bit Source’s clients have been from outside of the region and the state. From Silicon Valley to Texas, Justice has been able to offer clients across industries remotely. And with the acceleration of remote work put on by the pandemic, Justice finds opportunity for Eastern Kentucky in this digital economy. “Our brain drain can come home and work remotely from here, start their own businesses,” he said. “We have an economy fueled by innovation-driven enterprises that are creating and inventing and using our greatest resource: our people.”

“Through digital economies, being geographically bound by mountains is not a challenge anymore. We can compete.”

New Opportunities on the Horizon

As the world gears up for another paradigm shift in labor with the onset of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Justice has a relatively measured approach. As he’s seen the demise of an industry so inextricably linked with his home and his region, he has faith that other workers in other industries will find new ways to work. 

“There will be things that [artificial intelligence] displaces, and there will also be new jobs that it creates,” he offered. “People that say it’s all bad or it’s all good -- it’s neither. It’s just the thing that we need to understand and figure out how to use it and leverage it for our good.”

At the end of the day, though, Justice finds that his company holds an immediate social responsibility that extends across Appalachia. Ultimately, for Justice, “Bit Source can be instructive to how blue collar workers can become blue collar tech workers.” 

This blog post is part of an ongoing series exploring the economic resilience and future of Kentucky’s workforce. To subscribe to updates, sign up for our newsletter.