Unemployment rates dropped in 51 of West Virginia's 55 counties in October.WorkForce West Virginia says Jefferson County had the lowest unemployment rate…
Unemployment rates dropped in 51 of West Virginia’s 55 counties in October.
WorkForce West Virginia says Jefferson County had the lowest unemployment rate in the state at 3.2 percent, followed by Monongalia County at 3.9 percent, and Berkeley and Hampshire counties each at 4 percent.
Unemployment rates rose in Boone, Calhoun, Pendleton and Pocahontas counties.
Mingo County’s unemployment rate was the highest in the state at 12 percent, down seven-tenths of a percentage point from September.
It was followed by McDowell County at 10.9 percent and Logan County at 10.3 percent.
West Virginia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate dropped four-tenths of a percentage point to 6.9 percent in October.
West Virginia University researchers are forecasting continued high unemployment in West Virginia.
The WVU College of Business and Economics released its annual West Virginia Economic Outlook report Thursday at a conference in Charleston.
West Virginia’s unemployment rate in August was at 7.6 percent, the highest in the nation. The report says the unemployment rate is expected to remain at or above 7 percent through early 2016 before falling under 6 percent by 2019.
According to the report, jobs growth in West Virginia is estimated to increase by an average of 0.5 percent annually through 2020, far below the expected growth nationally of 1.2 percent.
The report says only 53 percent of the state’s adult population is working or looking for work, the nation’s lowest rate of labor force participation.
Unemployment rates fell in 29 states in August and held steady in 11 as hiring remained solid nationwide.
The Labor Department says rates rose in the remaining 10 states. Employers added jobs in 32 states and shed them in 18.
Job cuts continued in states with oil and gas drilling as oil prices remain sharply lower compared with a year ago. And falling demand for coal has devastated West Virginia, which has the nation’s highest unemployment rate at 7.6 percent. That is up from 7.5 percent in July.
South Dakota, which has seen a rise in oil and gas drilling, reported the largest percentage decline in jobs. Texas shed 13,700 positions.
U.S. employers added 173,000 jobs in August, while the national unemployment rate fell to 5.1 percent from 5.3 percent.
West Virginia's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose slightly in August to 7.6 percent.August's rate was one-tenth of a percentage point higher than…
West Virginia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate rose slightly in August to 7.6 percent.
August’s rate was one-tenth of a percentage point higher than July’s rate. Workforce West Virginia says 59,800 state residents were unemployed, an increase of 700 from July.
Employment rose by 1,000 in the service-providing sector and fell 300 in the goods-producing sector.
Among the increases were 900 in educational and health services, 700 in trade, transportation and utilities, and 300 in construction.
Employment fell by 600 in manufacturing and 300 each in professional and business services, and in leisure and hospitality.
The national unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percentage point in August to 5.1 percent.
The unincorporated town of Comfort, West Virginia, is made up of two gas stations and an elementary school. All three sit along a winding, two lane road that on any given day is peppered with trucks carry loads of coal. Coal they picked up at the Kanawha Eagle mining complex a few hundred feet down the road, but the last several years have been tough for the industry and now fewer and fewer of those trucks roll through.
The Miner
Credit Ashton Marra / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Patriot Coal electrician and Boone County resident Derek Chase.
Derek Chase, 31, has worked in the industry for nearly a decade. Previously a Massey Energy then Alpha Natural Resources employee, Chase currently works as an electrician for Patriot Coal at their Kanawha Eagle mining complex.
Patriot filed for bankruptcy this year and in August issued notices to some 1,000 employees in southern West Virginia that they could be laid off.
Those notices came on the same day that Alpha, the second largest mining company in the county, filed for bankruptcy itself.
But Chase’s story isn’t unique in Boone County, where he lives and works. The county has lost nearly 2,700 mining jobs since 2011, the highest number of coal job losses for any county in the nation.
The Budget
The decline hasn’t just been bad news for miners like Chase. Coal is one way local governments in West Virginia pay for things like water lines, senior centers and trash collection.
“All your coal counties are really hurting in southern West Virginia,” Boone County Commissioner Mickey Brown said. “We’re all the same.”
Credit Ashton Marra / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Boone County Commissioner Mickey Brown during a commission meeting in Madison.
Brown has served as a member of the county commission for 15 years and watched as his county’s budget grew in the early part of the decade because of an influx of tax dollars from the industry, both property taxes on mining facilities and equipment and severance taxes, or the 5 percent extraction tax companies pay on the value of the resource they mine.
As the price of coal declined over the past several years, Brown said so did the taxes Boone County collected. In 2012, he said his county budget was some $27 million. Today, it stands at about $14.6 million.
“Now, we’ve made cuts all along to where we’ve been watching what we’ve been spending,” he said.
And those cuts came to county services.
Before, when somebody would come in with a request, it could be an extravagant request and we could do it, but now we kind of made a policy that we aren't going to do anymore grants.- Boone Co. Commissioner Mickey Brown
The Community Impact
Boone County prioritizes projects that will bring public drinking water to its rural communities. Instead of paying for it themselves with severance tax dollars, today the county relies on federal and private grants to fund water line expansions. Those grants can be costly and time consuming for small governments to apply for and keep track of.
The amount of money the commission can grant to special projects is decreasing as well. Brown said a few years ago, the Boone County Board of Education came to the commission for help replacing the bleachers at all three county a high schools, a project that cost $500,000.
If that project came before the commission today, Brown said there is no way they could help.
“Before when somebody would come in with a request, it could be an extravagant request and we could do it,” he said, “but now we kind of made a policy that we aren’t going to do anymore grants. A thousand dollars a year maximum.”
The State
The state is starting to feel the pinch too. Deputy Revenue Secretary Mark Muchow said in 2012, coal-mining tax revenues made up about 9 percent of the state’s budget. In the fiscal year 2016, the budget year that began July 1, that amount is expected to be about 5.4 percent, a $148 million dollar decrease.
Muchow blames many factors for the decline in the industry: pressure from federal regulators, the abundance of cheaper, cleaner natural gas from fracking, a decrease in foreign demand, and deeper coal seams that are more expensive to mine.
Moving On
The decline in coal has made it hard for Chase to provide for his wife and three young children. His wife works as a nurse and Chase said she could provide for the family on her own if she worked as a traveling nurse, but he doesn’t want her to do that.
So Chase began looking for work, long before his lay off notice came. He found a job with CSX outside Albany, New York, some 650 miles from his home in Boone County.
“[You’ve] got to work somewhere and there’s not going to be any place to work here,” he said.
As of a few weeks ago, CSX had put Chase’s training on hold because of financial troubles elsewhere in the company, partially because of a decline in rail shipments of coal.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released July jobless numbers and once again West Virginia tops the list with the highest unemployment rate in the…
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released July jobless numbers and once again West Virginia tops the list with the highest unemployment rate in the nation.
West Virginia’s unemployment rate grew to 7.5 percent in July, up one-tenth of a percentage point from the previous month’s 7.4 percent.
West Virginia relies heavily on mining jobs and work related to the industry, but in the past few months, two major mining companies have declared bankruptcy, meaning an even steeper decline in production.
“It definitely is a big player. I think it’s one of the factors that’s pushing the unemployment rate up,” researcher Jeff Green with WorkForce West Virginia said of the state’s unemployment rates.
Green said major job losses are also occurring in the construction and service industries in the state, both of which are affected by mining.
Nevada and Washington, D.C., had the next-highest unemployment rates at 6.8 percent.
The national average remained unchanged at 5.3 percent.
