Where the Jobs Are

A month of great expectations ended last week for the U.S. Labor Department, which had hoped that after ten dreary months the stubborn unemployment rate would finally show improvement. As the final September figures rolled in, those hopes were drowned in the waves of Hurricane Carla, which washed out so many farm jobs for the month that unemployment clung tenaciously to 6.8% of the labor force. But there were still enough healthy indicators to encourage a Labor Department prediction that joblessness will drop below 4,000,000 this month for the first time since October 1960: non-farm jobs hit a September record of 61.4 million despite unemployment, the number of workers out of work for 15 weeks or more dropped a healthy 200,000 (to 1,300,000) and--most significantly--the unemployment rate of adult male breadwinners slid from 6.1% to 5.7%.

The figures that most excited the Labor Department were in a new set of statistics showing precisely and dramatically that the geography of U.S. industry--and the jobs that go with it--is shifting in a way that may change some of the classic patterns of job hunting. "We knew the trend was there," says Labor Department Manpower Expert Seymour Wolfbein, "but we had no idea how remarkably clear and strong the picture was." The picture: the traditional industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest are lagging behind the national average of nonfarm job growth, the South is growing much faster than the national average, and the southwestern section is booming along at three times the average (see map).

Waning Dominance. Until the 19303, the center of U.S. industry was in the heavily populated Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states. Then the boom of the metalworking industries centered around the Great Lakes, plus a big leg up from Detroit's auto plants, put the upper Midwest in front. The East and the Great Lakes states still account for the greatest number of industrial jobs by far, but Wolfbein's study shows that their absolute dominance is waning.

The Middle Atlantic states managed only a 10% increase in nonfarm jobs from 1947 to 1960 (v. 22% for the U.S.). One major drag was the faltering coal industry, which left Pennsylvania with only a 2% growth and destitute West Virginia with an 11% job drop. The only other state to decline was depressed Rhode Island (minus 1%), the hardest hit by the southward shift of New England's textile industry. And in the Great Lakes states, says Wolfbein, "factory employment actually declined while manufacturing jobs rose nationally by about 1,500,000." Reasons:

1) the metalworking industries proved to be most susceptible to automation, and

2) Detroit's automakers built many of their new plants closer to customers. Only the growth of service-industry and government jobs gave these states a below-average increase of 15%.

Wages & Rockets. Meanwhile, the South's bait of low wages, nonunion shops, and tax relief for new plants has paid off handsomely in new jobs. In the lead is Florida, which has rocketed ahead 95%--fueled by Cape Canaveral's missiles, by chemicals, and by carloads of tourists. After Florida, the heaviest percentage growth is in the nation's southwest quadrant. Texas with its petrochemicals, military bases and white-collar industries, California with its missiles and electronics plants, and Florida now account for one out of every six nonfarm jobs. Five Rocky Mountain states (Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada) all advanced at more than twice the national average, "not only because of defense installations such as Los Alamos," explains Wolfbein, "but right across the industrial board." Even with this record, the five have a long way to go before becoming highly industrialized: they still have only 1,500,000 nonfarm workers.

What does the changing U.S. jobography mean? For one thing, says Wolfbein, "we may see less of the classic pattern of job hunters flooding into the North from the South." For another, the shift shows the momentum of the force that creates chronic-unemployment areas when industry moves out--a problem that no one yet fully understands how to remedy. And it points up the need to explain the story of the new industrial map to the rapidly growing horde of new workers, so that a Southern boy training to be a die cutter will realize that he does not have to go to Detroit for work; the job he wants may be just 50 miles up the road from home.

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