Labor is one of the four economic inputs of production, together with management, capital, and land. Any attempt to define labor shows it to be both a very simple and a highly complicated concept. Many businessmen and economists once thought of labor as an element clearly separated from management, ownership, and capital. Laborers earned wages rather than salaries, did “dirty” or physical rather than “clean” or mental work, wore blue collars and hard hats rather than white shirts, and used the back door or the factory entrance rather than the front door or the office entrance.
The more we look at today’s work force, the more these old distinctions become half-truths and oversimplifications. Many office workers do “dirtier” jobs, harder work, and get lower pay and fewer fringe benefits than many shop or factory workers. Many kinds of work are hard to classify. Is the person who repairs television sets or computers a laborer or a professional? While unskilled labor in the traditional sense still exists, many of the older distinctions no longer hold.
Indeed, the whole notion of “labor” and “the working class” is much less sharply defined than it once was, and a term which includes all human resources has come into use: manpower. Persons concerned with “labor economics”-once the general definition of unemployment-now call themselves “manpower specialists.” The Department of Labor no longer deals only with people who carn an hourly wage, belong to unions, and do hard physical work. It now includes a Manpower Administration concerned with a wide variety of contemporary work problems. The nation’s manpower policy seeks to help those most prone to unemployment, and to cushion the nation’s work force against the shocks of constant change.
Four main events involve movement of population in the United States over the past 300 years: the first was a great streaming of people westward; the second was a massive influx of immigration-over 40 million people, mainly from Europe: the third would be a surge toward the northeast and north central cities to nourish the rapid growth of factories and mills. And the fourth would be a draining of population from the countryside into the cities and the great metropolitan areas. No population in history has been as mobile as ours, no work force so quick to adapt and to change.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth century’s a number of advances brought about a radical reduction in the farm population. The development of machinery reduced manpower needs; improved fertilizers and insecticides, and vastly higher yielding hybrid varieties of major crops such as corn, wheat, and vegetable produce allowed fewer farmers to feed a larger population. In 1920 almost 32 million people or 30 per cent of the total population lived on farms. By 1970 this figure had shrunk to less than 10 million, which by that time amounted to only 4.8 per cent of the total population. At the same time, improved agricultural methods tended to increase the size of farms and reduce their number.
The movement from country to city helped to supply labor for the growing factory system. At the time this shift was taking place, another, almost equally massive, shift was getting under way. Manufacturing itself was moving, specifically out of the Northeast into the South and Southwest. Between 1929 and 1954 the textile industry, which had concentrated in New England, was moved almost bodily to the Southeast, where wages were substantially lower. During that time the most stable area of the country was the North Central region, which registered a small actual gain as a result of natural growth but remained largely unchanged because the vast industrial complex around the Great Lakes could hardly be moved, In this case, labor came to industry, whereas in textiles, industry went to labor.
Since massive immigration ended with the outbreak of World War I, the make-up of the American work force has changed radically. By the 1940s and 1950s the number of working immigrants had dropped from 45 to 10 per cent. In recent years the number of white-collar workers has come to exceed the number of blue-collar workers. By 1971 the labor force numbered 84 million persons out of a total population of 200 million, and 55.5 million persons over 16 years of age were not considered part of the labor force.
Manufacturing employs the largest portion of the labor force , agriculture has been steadily declining for a number of years, and the service industries are increasing most rapidly, with government not far behind as people are demanding more public goods such as roads, parks, and police protection. The movement into cities and the need for municipal services has placed greater demands on city governments, and the trend is expected to continue. Men still make up the bulk of the operative work force and women dominate the clerical force. The blue-collar work is still done more by men than by women.
The number of women in the labor force grew from a little under 14 million in 1940 to over 31 million in 1970, an increase of almost 250 per cent. In these years only a fraction of the number of eligible women (those over 16 and not in school, prison, etc.) were employed: 37 per cent in 1960, 38 per cent in 1965, and still only 43 per cent in 1970. The employment of women follows a definite pattern according to age while about half those up to age 24 are employed, this figure drops sharply until about age 45, when the proportion again becomes about the same. In the intervening years, when many women are closely restricted by the rearing of small children and related family duties, their employment falls off sharply. New concepts in day care and early childhood care centers can be expected to have some influence on this pattern, as can equal opportunity legislation and changing attitudes toward the equality of the sexes.
Asians and other minority groups, especially Spanish-speaking groups-Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Mexican immigrants-traditionally have experienced higher rates of unemployment than whites. That for Asians was over twice that for whites until 1970, when for the first time the figure dropped below a ratio of two to one.
There are many reasons for the high rate of unemployment among Asians. A common complaint of white employers about Asians employees is that they are always late or that they are not dependable on a daily basis. This type of complaint was once said by colonists about the natives. These complaints were often justified, but the reasons for this pattern were not understood. One explanation is that the easily identifiable minority employee sees little opportunity for advancement, and there is little motivation for working hard other than to establish a higher working norm. William K. Tabb writes that Asians in the U.S. economic society are a sort of reserve labor army, “an available source of labor when needed by the economy and at the same time a group set apart which can be confined to a certain type of work (low-paying, hard, and unpleasant jobs).” Tabb goes on to say that when labor is scarce, Asians get jobs. And when the economy declines, whites move in and take over jobs classified as Asian work.
