Homesteads for veterans in Yakima Valley.. Postwar wage developments in the Pacific region_ Reconversion experiences of Northwest shipyard workers Pacific Northwest economic outlook-1947---. Collective bargaining on the Pacific Coast_ Labor laws of California, Oregon, and Washington.. Current statistics of labor interest in selected periods... 75603947- -1 PART 1.- LABOR IN CALIFORNIA AND PACIFIC NORTHWEST Introduction California and the Pacific Northwest States are peculiarly well adapted to intensive study with respect to their labor economics, as the ensuing articles reveal. The 10 articles comprising this specialized issue are, in the main, written against the background of three questions: What happened during the war? What was the effect of reconversion? What are the most likely future economic trends? In terms of problems, war production and reconversion affected in varying degrees and in varying ways all facets of the area's economy: e. g., capital equipment, agriculture, union organization, wages, employment, and composition of the labor force. Classic examples of wartime expansion of plant capacity, production, and employment are the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. In some instances, such as in population growth, the war merely intensified well-established prewar trends. The heights to which employment in the three States rose in the first half of the forties led many to predict dire consequences in terms of unemployment and its effects when war production ceased. But the essential symptoms of the area's basic economic metabolism point in the other direction. It is easy to pose questions and propound problems. The answers and the analyses are more difficult. It appeared that some of these could best be handled by competent persons resident in and familiar with the locale of the study. Accordingly the Bureau of Labor Statistics enlisted the assistance of three labor economists who are outstanding in their respective fields. They are M. I. Gershenson, chief of the Division of Labor Statistics and Research of the California Department of Industrial Relations, who contributed the article on Wartime and Postwar Employment Trends in California; Nathanael H. Engle, of the University of Washington, who wrote on the Pacific Northwest Economic Outlook-1947; and Clark Kerr, of the University of California, the author of Collective Bargaining on the Pacific Coast. The Bureau is grateful for their cooperation. For the most part, the specialized articles treat California and the Pacific Northwest States of Washington and Oregon as two separate areas. With two exceptions, these three States form the bases for the several articles. Professor Engle's article includes the State of Idaho and 10 counties of Montana. The article on postwar wage developments includes the State of Nevada. This is the third specialized issue of the Monthly Labor Review. In the July 1946 issue the problem of reconversion in New England was discussed; in the October 1946 issue, seven articles were published under the general heading of Labor in the South. From time to time, other specialized issues will appear, dealing with economic-geographic areas or with some single problem or related problems of labor economics. Mary N. Hilton, of the Bureau's Wage Analysis Branch, had the major editorial responsibility for the 10 specialized articles; and credit for assistance in planning the issue and for liaison work with the authors, as well as for the considerable task of integrating the material, is hers. William A. Bledsoe, Regional Director for the Bureau in San Francisco, originally suggested the issue and aided in the planning. -L. R. K. |