CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia continues to have one the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation but there’s another rate WorkForce West Virginia is taking a closer look at.
WorkForce West Virginia Deputy Executive Director Jeff Green told state lawmakers during this week’s interim committee meetings that the agency recently completed an internal study on what Green described as detached workers.
These are state residents, of working age, who at one time during the past five years received unemployment benefits or other services from WorkForce West Virginia but they no longer receive those benefits or other services and they also remain unemployed.
“They’re not deceased, not working, not working in another state, not incarcerated, they’re not doing anything,” Green told members of the legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance.
There are a lot of new jobs scheduled to come to West Virginia in the coming years. The Appalachian Hydrogen Hub project was announced in the past week. West Virginia AFL-CIO President Josh Sword said there could be thousands of jobs.
He said developing project labor agreements (PLAs) with all parties will help develop the number of required trades needed and allow the training process to begin.
“Our training programs within our union craft apprenticeship programs are three to five years old, so we need to get to work now to understand what the demand is going to be down the road,” Sword said during an appearance this week on WAJR Radio’s ‘Talk of the Town.’ “We can’t snap our fingers and have 10,000 to 20,000 workers ready to go.”
Nucor Steel is set to formally break ground on its plant in Mason County this Friday. The $2.7 billion investment will include thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent jobs.
According to WorkForce’s internal study, the rate of those detached workers is higher in parts of socioeconomically challenged southern West Virginia.
“It depends on where you are in the state. The southern part of the state, it tends to be in the mid-teens up to as high as 16.5% in McDowell County and those numbers go down considerably as you go toward the north, especially the north central region and eastern panhandle,” Green said.
Green told lawmakers research shows the longer a person stays out of work, the more likely they will remain out of work.
“The longer that somebody is detached from the workforce the more difficult is to get them to return,” Green said. “Their job skills atrophy, habits and other things change.”
Green told lawmakers WorkForce plans to take a closer look at what needs to be done to get those detached workers back in the workforce. He said they’ve found transportation is an issue.
“A lot of folks have significant challenges with transportation,” Green said. “That’s the next step in the research to find out what the transportation situation, to the extent that we can, that we have with these individuals.”
West Virginia had the second lowest workforce participation rate in the nation in August at 55.7% trailing only Mississippi’s 53.9% rate.