The need has been expressed, particularly by relatively small business organizations, for a simple but reasonably accurate method of spotting potential labor supplies frcm readily available data. Wage bills are occupying an increasingly important position in the semivariable cost structures of most industries. For this reason, prerequisites of industrial location involve not only the location of the required number of workers but also the selection of workers possessing the race, sex, and training characteristics desired by the organization in question. As the decentralization of industry progresses, the demand for, and the significance of, this type of information may be expected to increase. Relatively few persons in the business world are familiar with methods of interpreting the voluminous statistics available for help in dealing with these and other related problems, especially methods involving little or no cost. In some instances, consideration of the physical location factors, such as power, transportation, or nearness to markets and raw materials may be of equal or greater importance than the problems of labor supply in selecting a plant site. It is true that many plants are, in effect, resource-bound. How potent a factor the existence of workers, in certain numbers or possessing certain characteristics, will be in locating a plant bears a direct relationship to the proportion which labor costs bear to total costs. In many instances the physical factors desired by an industry will be equally available in a number of different places. If such is the case, the problem becomes one of choosing the best of the alternative sites on the basis of the availability of human resources. No amount of research will adequately take the place of an actual inspection of the area or interviews with prospective employees when a final decision is to be made as to location. State and local chambers of commerce, private research organizations, and university research bureaus, however, can often furnish much preliminary information and advice. Many businessmen would like to be able to make a preliminary investigation of the relative labor possibilities of the various counties in several states from analyses of data which are readily available at little or no expense. It is the purpose of this article to outline a simple technique which will satisfy this requirement by utilizing the basic statistics which are available in documents published by the United States Bureau of the Census and in annual reports of the labor departments in practically every state.L