Business, Government Legal News from throughout WVGallop Poll: WV among top 10 states for companies hiring workers

A new poll by Gallup shows West Virginia was in the top 10 states for businesses that were planning to hire workers instead of letting them go in 2011.

The Mountain State was tied at No. 7 with Indiana and South Dakota on Gallup's Job Creation Index, which compared all 50 states and Washington, D.C., on job creation statistics.

In the poll, Gallup asked U.S. workers whether their employer was hiring workers and increasing the size of its work force or letting workers go and reducing the size of its work force. The Job Creation Index is computed by taking the difference between the two percentages.

According to information from Gallup, the Index's results are based on interviews with nearly 200,000 workers in 2011, including at least 500 in every state.

In West Virginia, 35.1 percent of workers said their employers were looking to hire more employees while 16.2 percent said their employers were shrinking their work force. The net score based on those two indices was rounded up to +19.

Overall, 31 percent of U.S. workers reported their employer was hiring workers, while 18 percent said their employer was letting workers go, for a net score of 13. That marks the second consecutive year of improvement after the index had fallen from +18 in 2008 to -2 in 2009 before recovering to +7 in 2010. Gallup did not measure job creation in years prior to 2008.

Five of the nine states with the highest Job Creation Index scores are Midwestern states, including North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, and South Dakota. The states with the lowest scores are largely a mixture of Eastern states — Rhode Island, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and New York — and Western states — Nevada, Oregon, and New Mexico.