Mill owners unsure when work will rise

A temporary shutdown caused by low lumber prices is affecting about 50 swing-shift workers at the DeArmond Mill.

Stimson Lumber Co., which owns the mill, is monitoring prices daily, but isn’t sure when the mill will be back to full production, said Andrew Miller, the company’s chief executive officer. Some of the workers have been reassigned to Stimson’s other operations in North Idaho.

The company’s Priest River sawmill has also scaled back production. It’s operating four days a week, instead of five.

After three years of strong markets, prices for lumber and other wood products began tumbling this spring, reaching lows not seen since the early 1990s. “Mills are losing quite a bit of money today,” Miller said.

Analysts tie the falling prices to a national slowdown in home construction.

Mills across the West are curtailing production. Bennett Forest Products in Grangeville, Idaho, told most of its 160 workers to stay home this week. Riley Creek has been operating its Moyie Springs mill with only one shift since July.

New York

Economists urge raise in minimum wage

More than 650 economists, including five winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, called Wednesday for an increase in the minimum wage, saying the value of the last increase, in 1997, has been “fully eroded.”

Critics of a minimum wage increase have contended a higher minimum wage will lead employers to cut jobs or move them offshore. They also say that many minimum wage earners are teenagers working after-school jobs.

Anchorage, Alaska

Electrical problem hampering oil output

America’s largest oil field will produce very few barrels over the next several days as operator BP scrambles to fix an electrical problem.

So far, the loss of 300,000 barrels a day of Alaskan output has not rattled oil markets.

BP PLC said electrical shorts that shut down Prudhoe Bay on Tuesday followed three days of dust storms, and then rain, coating insulators on high-voltage lines with mud.

Houston

Skilling asks judge to overturn verdict

Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling has asked a federal judge to overturn his guilty verdict based on an August decision that reversed four other Enron-related convictions.

Skilling, 52, was found guilty in May of fraud, insider trading, conspiracy and lying to auditors for actions leading to his abrupt resignation in August 2001. Four months later, his company – once the nation’s seventh-largest – went bankrupt amid revelations of inflated profits and hidden debts.

Skilling faces sentencing on Oct. 23, and may be sent to jail at that time.