Millwork industry shows slow growth in productivity, (EXCERPT), Monthly Labor Review Online, September 1982

Millwork industry shows
slow growth in productivity

Jack Veigle and Horst Brand

Labor productivity inn the millwork industry rose at an average annual rate of 1.4 percent from 1958 to 1980,¹ a modest advance when compared with total manufacturing. Over this period, output in millwork increased at a rate of 2.7 percent annually and employee hours at 1.3 percent. The productivity rise partly reflected low growth in capital investment, particularly over the past decade, and evidently slow diffusion of modernized production technologies. These factors, combined with instability in demand for the industry's products, retarded productivity. Industry demand depends mostly upon residential construction, where fluctuations have been frequent and substantial.

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Footnotes

1 The millwork industry has been designated as number 2431 in the 1972 Standard Industrial Classification Manual of the Office of Management and Budget. It consists of establishments which primarily manufacture such millwork products as moldings, wooden doors, windows, shutters, blinds, and awning and other architectural millwork items. All average annual rates of change are based on the linear least squares trend of the logarithms of the index numbers. The indexes for productivity and related variables will be updated annually and published in the annual BLS Bulletin, Productivity Indexes for Selected Industries.

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