Feds report rural Idaho’s loss of high-paying jobs

BOISE – Federal analysts are providing more evidence of continued hard times in rural Idaho despite mounting indicators that the state economy is on the upswing.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in its quarterly assessment of state economies, said the continued erosion of Idaho’s timber industry has accounted for another 4 percent loss of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs.

That was on the heels of a 3.7 percent loss in manufacturing employment the year before.

“While the number of jobs in this subsector is small, they are important to rural economies because they are relatively high-wage jobs,” FDIC analysts concluded.

At the same time, nonfarm employment grew by nearly 1.4 percent, one of the fastest rates in the nation, but several recent state employment reports have shown the bulk of those new jobs are generated in the most populous counties. Work in the service sector, which is viewed as generally lower paying, accounts for three times as many paychecks as other job classifications.

“There are two Idahos,” private economist Don Reading said on Thursday. “One is the rural counties that population estimates show are still losing people while there are pockets of vitality in the urban areas. For those rural areas, in relative terms, those timber jobs might not look very big, but in those communities they can be extremely important.”

State economists reported that from the end of 2002 to last January, Idaho lost another 1,000 jobs in the wood products industry, amounting to another 10 percent drop.