A Deviation in the Pattern of Relative Earnings for Production Workers and Office Personnel

Abstract

TN A RECENT issue of this Journal, Professor Robert K. Burns showed that, in recent decades, the preferred position which white-collar workers once enjoyed vis-a-vis manual laborers has decidedly declined.' He attributes this to three factors: (1) the increase in educational opportunities which has had the effect of enlarging the white-collar labor supply more than proportionately with the increase in the number of jobs, (2) the significance of unionization, which has occurred among manual laborers but not among white-collar workers, and (3) corollary changes which have taken place in the institutional and sociological parameters of the respective labor markets. Through the use of aggregate statistics, Burns has presented a substantial case. However, he implies that these phenomena have produced the same effects throughout the United States, and his study makes no attempt to indicate the diversity with which these changes have affected the relative positions of the labor groups in different regional segments of the economy. The purpose of this paper is to qualify some of Burns's findings and to show that there are sectors, notably the South, where the white-collar worker not only continues to enjoy economic preference over the production worker, but is in a much more equitable position relative to wages elsewhere in the country than is the southern production worker.2 Burns's study was concerned primarily with the long-term changes in the relative positions of office personnel and manual labor. The data with which I deal is for the period of late 1951 and early 1952 and does not yield any conclusions with respect to the problem over time. While it might be possible to draw deductions from the fact that there appears to be strong evidence that regional differentials persist and continue over time,3 this paper claims only that office personnel are in a significantly different condition with respect to manual labor in the South than in other sectors of the economy. The principal findings of the paper are as follows: A comparison of earnings differentials between production workers