Roseburg Forest Products laid off 146 millworkers in the tiny city of Riddle on Wednesday, the latest in a string of cuts in the state’s wood products industry.
The company said it is shifting specialty plywood production from Riddle to a mill in Coquille. The mill in Riddle will focus on veneer.
“We recognize that decisions like this are difficult for our team members and their families and are not made lightly,” Roseburg CEO Stuart Gray said in a written statement. Laid-off workers will receive pay and healthcare benefits for 60 days.
Riddle is a city of a little more than 1,000 residents, about 90 miles south of Eugene. This week’s layoffs will further strain the labor market in Douglas County, where the unemployment rate was 6.4% at the end of last year. That’s 1.2 points above the statewide average.
Oregon endured a historic spate of mass layoffs in 2024 and 2025, with many of the cuts concentrated in the state’s manufacturing sector. The pace of job cuts appeared to ease over the past three months and state economists told a legislative panel Wednesday they are hoping for more stability in the labor market in 2026.
Oregon’s forest products industry has been repositioning itself over the past two years and the result has been a steady stream of job cuts dating back to 2023. C&D Lumber laid off 93 when it closed a mill in Riddle in 2024, for example, and Roseburg Forest Products laid off 100 last September at a plant in Dillard.
Manufacturers said they were responding to timber shortages, rising operating costs, falling market prices, competition from overseas and changing consumer preferences.
At the same time, however, Roseburg Forest Products is in the process of spending $700 million to build and upgrade other facilities in southern Oregon. The company said Wednesday that it is maintaining “a disciplined focus on the products best positioned to carry Roseburg into the future including engineered wood, specialty plywood, MDF (medium-density fiberboard), and lumber.”
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