OCR Text |
Show Changes In M Trends Shown By Data Oefeasad By U. S, Government , Official government figures on the labor force and its makeup make-up provide a composite picture of how the American people earn their livelihood and the trends in employment patterns over the last two decades. One of the significant developments develop-ments of the period was the marked increase in nonagricul-tural nonagricul-tural employment, mostly in business and industry, and the accompanying decline in farm jobs. Last year 50.7 million people, or 80 per cent of the entire labor la-bor force, made their living in non - agricultural occupations. This not only represented an increase of 13.5 million persons so employed as compared with 1929, but lifted the proportion of the total labor force in non-agricultural non-agricultural employment by 5 per cent over 1929. i i 1 At the same time, agricultural agricultur-al employment declined from 10.5 million to 8 million persons, and its proportion of the total labor force from 21 per cent in 1929 to 13 per cent in 1949. In other words, only one out of J every eight in the labor force is now earning his livelihood by a farming job as against one out of every five 20 years ago. Back in 1929 agriculture rivalled ri-valled manufacturing as the biggest big-gest singe source of jobs, but today it has 6 million fewer jobs than industry. A number of factors are responsible for this development, particularly the mechanization of agricultural agricul-tural production. Another interesting development develop-ment in the employment trends of the last two decades was an increase in the number and proportion pro-portion of people working for wages and salaries. Last year nearly seven out of every ten members of the labor force were drawing a paycheck from private pri-vate business and industry or from government. The aggregate number so employed em-ployed was just under 43 million mil-lion people, representing 68 per cent of the entire labor force. In 1929 the total number of wage and salary workers was just over 31 million, representing represent-ing 63 per cent of the whole labor force. |