1 Manufacturing accounts for less than 5 percent of total nonagricultural employment.

2 Data for 1959 adjusted for noncomparability due to area redefinition.

The loss in manufacturing employment was replaced by growth in the service-based industrieswholesale and retail trade, finance, insurance, and real estate, government, and services.

The finding that manufacturers are no longer attracted to the larger metropolitan areas is well illustrated by the fact that manufacturing employment in both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas remained, practically speaking, unchanged over the past 5 years while manufacturing employment in the State of California as a whole advanced by 6 percent. This trend was reversed in many of the smaller metropolitan areas which expanded rapidly in both manufacturing and nonmanufacturing employment, as shown in the following tabulation:

Mining

Mining was the only major industry which showed a continuous employment decline since 1939. The industry had been declining long before 1939, but the years between the beginning of the war and 1948 had brought a moderate increase. Since then, the loss in mining jobs has been persistent; mining employees constituted 3 percent of total nonagricultural employment in 1939 but only 1 percent in 1964. The shift in mining was from the North to the Southwest, as the demand for the coal in Pennsylvania and West Virginia slackened and the demand for the natural gas and petroleum in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma increased (table 3).

Other Nonmanufacturing

Contract construction showed the greatest growth in the 25-year period, particularly in the early war years and early postwar years. The construction forces of most States increased substantially. Since 1939, California and Florida boosted construction employment by 343 percent and 376 percent respectively; the New York construction force, on the other hand, grew by only 82 percent. After 1947, the construction boom subsided somewhat and employment in this industry has remained at a fairly constant level since the mid-1950's.

The number of employees engaged in transportation and public utilities, after increasing by 42 percent between 1939 and 1947 showed a decline

of 6 percent since 1947. The transportation segment has been strongly modified as motor freight and air transportation have taken the place of railroads. In 1939, railroads employed 34 percent of all transportation and public utilities employees. By 1964, railroads had been reduced to half of their former importance and employed only 17 percent. Today, communities depend to a large extent on private passenger transportation, and growth in this sector is reflected not in transportation but rather in highway construction and automobile production employment. Public utilities have, of course, added substantially to new employment in growing States such as California and Florida (both have nearly doubled their employment in the transportation and public utilities division since 1947). During the same time span, the New England, Middle Atlantic, and North Central States, with heavy concentrations of railroads, reduced employment in this division by 11 to 14 percent.

In trade, the older and larger centers in the East lost ground while the Southern and Western regions boasted employment expansions well above the national average.

Employees in finance, insurance, and real estate have traditionally been concentrated in New York; however, this has changed over the years. Whereas New York claimed 25 percent of all finance division employees 25 years ago, only 17 percent are based there today. New finance centers have grown up in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston. The Mountain States have expanded their finance employment rolls by nearly 400 percent, Florida more than 500 percent. The number of persons on New York finance payrolls in 1947 was practically the same as it had been in 1939, while nationally, finance employment had increased 20 percent. Since 1947, however, New York has expanded this division considerably, especially in New York City; the New England States, notably Massachusetts and Connecticut,

have shown new strength in finance in recent years.

Government and services were instrumental in the post-World War II employment expansion. One out of every two employees entering the nonagricultural labor force since 1947 worked for either a service or a government establishment. All States had employment increases in these sectors, although the rate of expansion in the West was usually about double the rate in the East. It is notable that about 85 percent of the employment increase in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions was in service and government. Large employment growths are expected in areas associated with large population growths, and certainly this is true of California, Florida, and Arizona which more than doubled their populations between the 1940 and 1960 censuses. However, the predominantly agricultural West North Central, East South Central, and West South Central regions maintained a relatively stable population and still produced substantial gains in nonagricultural employment. (See following tabulation.)

2 Adjusted for noncomparability prior to 1958.

workers in Mississippi were able to earn only an average of $71.46. Nevada, Ohio, California, and Washington followed Michigan, while North Carolina, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Georgia were next to Mississippi at the lower end of the scale.

The wide divergence between wages in the North Central and Western regions and those in the South was primarily due to a difference in products manufactured. One of the highest paid manufacturing activities was the production of motor vehicles, with national factory weekly earnings of $144 in 1964. About half of this industry was concentrated in Michigan, and thus contributed to that State's high earnings level. Other States with high earnings averages also boasted concentrations of durable goods production; for example, aircraft and missile manufacturing with weekly earnings of $125 was heavily concentrated in California. On the other end of the scale, the Southern and New England States were centers of nondurable goods production (chiefly textiles and apparel), and the relatively low levels of weekly earnings in these industries ($73 and $64, respectively) deflated the average for total manufacturing.

Wide differences in earnings also occurred in different areas of the same State. In Pennsylvania, the 1964 average weekly earnings in the Pittsburgh area (predominantly primary metals industries) were $126.28 compared with $70.62 in the Wilkes-Barre-Hazleton area (apparel industries); in Houston (fabricated metals and ma

chinery), workers averaged $119.26 per week, while in San Antonio (food processing industries), workers averaged only $75.76.

Regional differences in earnings of similar manufacturing activities were quite pronounced for some industries. The 1964 average earnings in transportation equipment were $2.68 per hour or $107.50 per week in Alabama and $3.18 or $134.30 in Ohio. (Alabama's transportation equipment industry consists of a variety of small plants engaged in shipbuilding, aircraft, and railroad equipment, while Ohio has a large number of highwage automobile plants). New York apparel workers making high fashion men's and women's coats, suits, and dresses earned an average hourly rate of $2.23 or $77.40 per week, while workers in North Carolina, producing work clothing, shirts, and underwear, received only $1.44 an hour or $54.15 per week. Recent trends show that this regional gap is narrowing somewhat and that southern workers are beginning to catch up with their northern counterparts. Since 1954, average hourly earnings of primary metal workers in Alabama increased 59 percent, from $1.93 to $3.06, while those of Pennsylvania steel workers rose only 48 percent, from $2.13 to $3.16-hence, a 20cent hourly earnings differential in 1954 had shrunk to 10 cents by 1964. For the same time span, the average hourly earnings of North Caro

Chart 2. Percent Increase in Nonagricultural Employment by Major Industry Division, 1947-64

Average weekly hours of manufacturing production workers showed only minor changes over the past 25 years with the exception of the World War II period when extremely long hours were common. The 40-hour week continues to be the general rule for most States. There was less variation in the length of the basic work week than there was in earnings among manufacturing industries. The difference between the highest and lowest average weekly hours of the selected States appearing in table 4, was about 10 percent while the highest average weekly earnings figure was almost. double the lowest figure. The durable goods industries tended to have a slightly longer average workweek with more premium-paid overtime than did the nondurable industries. Firms located in the East North Central States were generally durable goods manufacturers, and the longer hours of this sector were an added factor in the higher wages in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Hours in 10 out of the 11 States listed in table 4 have risen slightly during the recent accelerated economic expansion.