If jobs were trees Employment doesn't keep pace with lumber production's growth Photos by Christopher Millette Sawmills in West Virginia, like Facemyer Lumber mill in Ripley, are producing record amounts of lumber. But they don't turn those trees into as many jobs as they could.
Timber is the only manufacturing industry where employment has increased in the last decade.
There are 3,000 more people working in timber than there were in the mid-1980s. But the amount of timber cut annually in West Virginia has doubled since the mid-1980s, to more than 1 billion board feet. The number of people working in the timber industry has increased by half that rate, to about 10,000. Over and over, timber industry boosters predict that a boom is just around the corner. If we keep cutting, they say, the jobs will come.