Idaho Industry Teams Up With Colleges To Fill Sawmill Jobs

Idaho’s sawmills once relied on the brute strength of their workers to turn logs into lumber. Now, they need more employees like Jeremy Lozano-Keays. The 30-year-old electrical technician is part of a team overseeing the sophisticated electronic equipment that keeps Idaho Forest Group’s Chilco sawmill operating.

Each hour it’s running, the mill north of Coeur d’Alene spits out enough lumber to frame six to eight houses. Eight electrical technicians work at the mill, including Lozano-Keays. The skilled-labor jobs pay between $25 and $34 per hour, plus benefits. Yet Idaho Forest Group has difficulty recruiting qualified candidates for the positions, said Tommy Groff, the mill’s maintenance manager.

Faced with labor shortages, the company has teamed up with North Idaho College, Lewis Clark State College and other wood products manufacturers to train 200 sawmill workers over the next two years. “When people think of sawmills, they think of the sawmills of yesterday, when a lot of sweat and blood was required to make each board,” Groff said. However, “very few of our 230 employees ever touch a board.”

As mills have become more automated, they employ fewer workers, but those workers are highly trained, said Beti Becker, a consultant for Idaho Forest Group. North Idaho’s sawmill employment peaked in the mid-1990s at about 3,600 workers. Last year, the wood products industry employed about 1,900 workers in the state’s five northern counties. Becker, who spent four decades as a human resources manager in the forest products industry, recalls when young men from rural areas followed their dads and uncles into jobs at local sawmills. But after 20 years of industry downturns and downsizing, that type of family succession is much rarer, she said.

During the 1990s and 2000s, “a lot of people re-trained and took other jobs,” Becker said. The industry is still recovering from that exodus, she said. These days, sawmills are looking for operators with advanced manufacturing experience, said Groff, the maintenance manager. And the industry is competing with a lot of other employers for workers with that skill set, he said.

From The Spokesman-Review: spokesman.com.