This month, we're pleased to launch the 11th annual 100 Best Companies to Work For in Oregon survey (www.oregonbusiness.com/100best). Our challenge, as always, is to provide an efficient, accessible and rigorous process for surveying thousands of Oregon employees at hundreds of companies in order to pick the places that deliver the highest job satisfaction in the state.

While the 100 Best is all about the quality of our jobs, the state is wrestling with a more pernicious problem: the quantity of jobs. Oregon is still more than 24,000 jobs short of break-even after the recession. Many of the jobs lost were blue-

collar, skilled jobs paying union or union-scale wages at companies that make things. That kind of job allows a person -- even without a college degree -- to pay the bills, buy a house, go on vacation, send the kids to college.

And the prospects are none too promising in the near term. "I don't see next year as being that strong," former Oregon treasurer Bill Rutherford told me recently. Rutherford, who heads an investment firm, explained: "The party in power does whatever it can to goose up the economy during an election year. They've spent a lot of effort and money to do that. Whichever party wins likes to have the first year of their term be soft, so the others can look good by comparison."

Rutherford also had some specific worries about Oregon. "Technology still is the dominant industry," he said, "and it looks to continue to be soft. I don't see the capital spending kicking in, and until it resumes that's a big black cloud over Oregon."

In our online reader survey (Input, page 9), we found a bit more optimism among the 825 business leaders we polled -- but not much more. The Willamette Valley was the only region in which more than half said they anticipated increasing their work forces in 2005; sentiment was most downbeat in Central and Eastern Oregon, with just 37% planning hires.

But these facts don't tell the whole story. In

all the statistical mud wrestling about the number of jobs, little if anything is usually said about what those jobs are like day in and day out. It's as if all that matters in our work life is a regular paycheck.

At a party recently I met an editor for a national book publisher who telecommutes from a home office in Portland. "I love my job," she told me sheepishly, as if loving her work was something unseemly and unfair to reveal among fellow drones in the professional work world. I, too, have always loved my jobs. Maybe I'm just lucky; it certainly helps that most of the companies I've worked for have had missions I believed in, and most of my bosses have wanted me to be

challenged and fulfilled.

We at Oregon Business want to share that kind of good fortune this year. So we're asking thousands of employees what they love in their workplaces and what they want improved. By doing so, we hope to shine a bright light on those companies and organizations that offer hard-working Oregonians the financial, intellectual and spiritual compensation they deserve on the job.

If you have comments about any articles you've read in Oregon Business magazine, e-mail us at feedback@oregonbusiness.com.

Copyright 2004 Oregon Business magazine