Nonmanufacturing Industries

Abstract

Outside of manufacturing, industries in the nonfarm business sector can be divided into two groups for purposes of this study: those whose capital is available and operates throughout the day and year, like the electric and gas utilities, and all others. The dichotomy is useful because the former group has experienced no change in average weekly hours of operation and because in terms of gross stocks of fixed capital it accounts for more than two-fifths of the weight of the nonfarm business sector. As for the other industries, generalizing about them is difficult except to say that the principles governing the adoption of shift work found in manufacturing should operate here. The force of custom or consumer habits, however, is more important in industries like retail trade than in manufacturing. Basic data come from a variety of sources. The study makes use of some BLS Industry Wage Surveys for coal mining; a small survey of retail-store hours gleaned from newspaper ads going back to 1929; a special tabulation of weekly hours worked by proprietors from the decennial censuses of 1950, 1960, and 1970 supplemented with similar information from the 1977 Current Population Survey; and a tabulation of broadcasting hours by television and radio stations. In the absence of statistical information I had to resort to assumptions about some industries, like construction, in which shift work is quite uncommon and average weekly capital hours are assumed to move like average weekly hours of labor.