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.

Prospective Labor Supply on the West Coast'

2

THE WARTIME EXPANSION of labor supply on the West Coast was unprecedented in the region's long history of rapid labor-force growth. Though the gains in California were the most spectacular, exceptional increases in the working populations of Oregon and Washington also took place. A determination of the probable degree of permanency of this unusual labor-force growth and of future labor-supply prospects is fundamental to any appraisal of the economic outlook for the Pacific Coast region. The present article analyzes war and prewar labor-force developments in the region and presents estimates of prospective labor supply in 1950 3 (see table 3, p. 571). These are supplemented by information on the basic socio-economic characteristics of the West Coast work force.

3

Sources of Wartime Labor Supply

The projects initiated under the National Defense Program, followed by World War II, greatly accelerated the expansion of labor supply in the Pacific Coast region. Between 1940 and 1945 the labor force for the three Far Western States expanded by 1,591,000, to a total of 5,859,000. This increase in working population, during a 5-year period, was substantially larger than any of the great spurts in West Coast labor supply that occurred during 10-year periods between 1870 and 1940. The largest previous expansion took place between 1920 and 1930 and amounted to 1,162,000 (see table 1).

In war, as in peace, the Pacific Coast had the fastest growing work force in the Nation (see chart 1). The expansion of 37 percent in the region's labor supply between 1940 and 1945 was nearly double the rate of increase for the country as a whole (table 2). The increase in every section of the country during the war was significant, but the gains, except for the West Coast, did not range higher than between 15 and 24 percent.

1 Prepared by Lester M. Pearlman, under the direction of Leonard Eskin, in the Bureau's Occupational Outlook Division.

See articles on Wartime and Postwar Employment Trends in California and on Employment in the Northwest in this issue.

Source of data on labor-force changes since 1940, unless otherwise indicated, is Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin No. 893, State and Regional Variations in Prospective Labor Supply (reprinted from Monthly Labor Review, December 1946, with additional data).

The labor force includes all civilians 14 years of age and over, who are working or seeking work and members of the armed forces.

Although nearly three-fourths of the gain in labor force on the West Coast during the war took place in California, the percentage increase in that State was somewhat smaller than in Washington, and only moderately larger than in Oregon. High wartime demands for labor, particularly in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, brought thousands of workers into the labor market of each of the West Coast States. It is significant that 5 out of 10 areas which were selected for special census studies by the President's Committee for Congested Production Areas were on the Pacific Coast. The urban areas surveyed by the Census Bureau in order to indicate the strain being put upon facilities and resources in areas of unusual wartime activity, included Los Angeles, Portland-Vancouver, Puget Sound, San Diego, and San Francisco Bay."

• See Bureau of the Census, Population, Series CA, Washington, 1944. The other 5 congested production areas were Charleston (S. C.), Detroit-Willow Run, Hampton Roads, Mobile, and Muskegon.

TABLE 1.-Population and labor-force growth in the United States and the Pacific Coast Region, 1870-1940 1

1 Adapted from decennial censuses, 1870 to 1940, Bureau of the Census, Washington, D. C. Data refer to persons 14 years of age and over. Figures for years earlier than 1940 refer to "gainful workers"; i. e., persons usually employed in a gainful occupation; figures for 1940 refer to "labor force", persons working or seeking work during the week ending Mar. 30, 1940. These concepts are broadly comparable, and, for purposes of this article, are considered under the general term "labor force." The labor force includes members of the armed forces.

Adjusted data for 1910 are adapted from the Sixteenth Census Population report, Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940, Bureau of the Census, Washington, D. C., 1943.

Preliminary, pending release of Census official estimate of United States total on basis comparable with current census series.

TABLE 2.-Sources of wartime labor supply, by major geographic division, April 1940 to April 1945

The States included in divisions other than the Pacific are as follows: Mountain Division-Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada; West South Central DivisionArkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas; East South Central Division-Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi; South Atlantic Division-Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; West North Central Division-Minnesota, lows, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas; East North Central Division-Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin; Middle Atlantic Division-New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; New England Division-Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

1 Preliminary, pending release of Census official estimate of United States total, on basis comparable with current Census series. Labor force includes persons 14 years of age and over working or seeking work and members of the armed forces.