palletcentral

Pallet C e nt ral • Janu a r y - Fe b r u a r y 2 0 26 25 W hen you look at the life cycle of a wooden pallet, its story doesn't begin on a manufacturing floor with measured and cut boards. It begins much earlier— in a forest, where loggers harvest raw materials that will eventually support global commerce. From there, logs move through processing facilities, sawmills, transportation networks, and finally into pallet manufacturing plants, where they are assembled into one of the most essential tools in the modern supply chain. At every stage, people make this system work. And at every stage, labor shortages are putting it at risk. Disruptions such as logistics bottlenecks, trade policy shifts, and lumber price volatility are familiar challenges for the pallet industry. But one disruption has been unfolding quietly and persistently for years: a growing workforce shortage that threatens the stability of the pallet life cycle. A Workforce Under Strain Labor constraints are not limited to pallet manufacturing. ey stretch upstream through the forest products supply chain: • Roughly 41% of logging operations are operating with less than half of their desired workforce capacity (Timberland Investor, Oct. 2025). • More than 50 sawmills closed between 2023 and 2024 (American Loggers Council, Mar. 2024), with the industry continuing to lose roughly one mill per week—a trend that has eliminated thousands of jobs and more than 4% of US sawmills through closures and consolidation (Hardwood Federation; National Hardwood Lumber Association, as cited in Fox Business News/ Agriculture, Dec. 2025). • Across manufacturing as a whole, nearly 500,000 US jobs remain unfilled (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Apr. 2025). When labor gaps occur at any point— from logging, milling, transport, to manufacturing—the downstream effects are immediate. Because pallets quite literally move the world, a workforce disruption in this industry doesn't just slow production; it ripples through global supply chains. In 2023, the National Wooden Pallet & Container Association partnered with the Manufacturing Institute's (MI) Center for Manufacturing Research to examine the workforce challenges facing

• Cover