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Displaced NW Wood Industry Workers The January 7 Oregonian newspaper summarizes conclusions of an unpublished study tracing the employment histories of 60,000 workers employed in Oregon's "wood products industry" in 1990. The study, expected to appear in the Journal of Forestry later this year, found that 58% of those workers had left employment in the sector by 1998, and of those, about 18,000 found unrelated work in Oregon, half of that number in lower-paid service sector jobs and a third in better paying jobs in the urban northwestern part of the state. About half of those who left employment in the wood products sector disappeared from the state's employment roles altogether -- presumably retiring, remaining unemployed, or moving out of state. The Oregonian characterizes the study, authored by economists at Oregon State University and the Oregon Employment Department, as "the first major effort to watch how environmentally driven economic changes affect individual workers" and points out that during the same period Oregon's average worker experienced a 23% increase in earnings.
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