Idaho Unemployment

Yesterday afternoon I went to meet Mary Kay at the Festival of Trees. It seemed warm enough and I didn't want to have to wear or carry my coat inside, so I wore a turtleneck and a heavy sweater and my gloves. I'm walking towards the ticket booth and stuff is falling that I think is pollen from the trees, nope, that was snow. Not enough to stick around, but it made me realize how cold it really was.

The Festival of Trees is put on by Saint Alfonse's hospital. One group sponsors the tree, has it decorated to a theme, and then St Al's has a gala where people buy the trees. Who knows what they do with them, but many of them have stuff on them that you would want, like antique ornaments, toys, food, wine, and skis. Mary Kay kept remarking on how many of them did not sell this year.

This morning I finished a study from my trip to the Grand Tetons,


The State of Idaho published their monthly update, which I get at work.

Potato farming remains stable and growing and potato farming wages increased, although they are historically below average. Someone at BYU has found a way to successfully grow soybeans in Idaho, I guess soybeans are cheap to grow, so more profitable than some other crops. There is a whole section on how many seniors in Idaho are going back to work and living just above the poverty level. I guess a large number of them in Idaho are also raising their grandchildren. I can't give much credence to the "poverty level", since that is now a number based on criteria that keeps changing, so it doesn't mean anything. They tried to put a positive spin on the last quarter 2010 employment numbers, but I could not see it in any of the graphs. Seemed like they were saying 2010 wasn't as much worse than 2009 as 2009 was compared to 2008.

Here's the horrible Idaho unemployment rate numbers,

The unemployment rate jumped from 2.9 percent in 2007 to 9.3 percent in 2010, a 220 percent increase bettered only by Nevada’s 223 percent rise. Official unemployment jumped from an average of 21,700 in 2007 to over 70,000 three years later. The number of part time workers wanting full time jobs is only higher in Nevada, with Idaho joined by Utah and Arizona as second highest, and Idaho’s long-term unemployed, workers who were with-out jobs for at least 15 weeks, jumped from 4,500 in 2007 to over 31,000 in 2010.

They did include a great history of the forestry industry in Idaho and Potlach Lumber, since that industry lost even more jobs when another mill closed this year. Here's the link to the pdf file,

http://labor.idaho.gov/publications/lmi/pubs/idempnews/iecur.pdf

Also check out the amount of federally owned land in Idaho and how all federal compensation for that land will end in January, 2012. I had no idea that part of Teddy Rosevelt's deal was that in exchange for national forest land, he gave 25% of the timber revenues to communities in those forests for infrastructure. Now federal lands provide less timber than they did in 1947 when records began.

I also did not know that Idaho is the nation's third largest milk producing state. This helped attract Agro Farma to build a plant in Twin Falls to make Chobani Greek yogurt. Chobani is Greek for shepherd and is symbolic for safety and good. The company uses only milk produced without the synthetic growth hormone, recombinant bovine somatotropin, which I hope means that milk produced in Idaho is absent the hormone, or maybe Agro Farma was attracted to Idaho's shepherd history.

On a final note, not in the Idaho employment paper, the Idaho Candy Company, makers of the Idaho Spud Bar, are coming out with a new candy in 2012 called Huckleberry Gems. Idaho Candy has been making the Idaho Spud since 1918, and that is cocoa flavored marshmallow in the center of an Idaho Spud.

Sometimes in Idaho I feel much more of a history of industry than I felt anywhere else, but I am surprised how much Idaho tolerated the federal land grab.