Productivity in making air conditioners, refrigeration equipment, and furnaces

Productivity in making air conditioners,
refrigeration equipment, and furnaces

Horst Brand and Clyde Huffstutler

Output per employee hour in the manufacture of air conditioning, refrigeration, and warm-air heating equipment¹ rose at an average annual rate of 1.3 percent between 1967 and 1982, compared with 2.4 percent a year for all of manufacturing. Output climbed 3.4 percent a year during the period, and employee hours, 2.1 percent. (See table 1.) Strong expansion in the demand for the industry's residential, commercial, and industrial products, and rapid diffusion of basic improvements in metalworking technologies (such as numerical control and computer numerical control) were among factors underlying the rising productivity trend.

The improvement in the industry's productivity occurred mostly in the earlier part of the period reviewed. After 1973, output per employee hour did not change, as shown by the output per employee hour did not change, as shown by the following tabulation of average annual rates of change:

	Industry	All manufacturing
1967-82	1.3	2.4
1967-73	5.1	3.4
1973-82	0.0	1.7

The industry's productivity rate for the 1967-73 period was 50 percent again as high as for manufacturing, but thereafter the trends in the two rates diverged.

This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1984 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes

1 The industry for which labor productivity is discussed here has been designated as number 3585 in the Standard Industrial Classification Manual (1972), published by the Office of Management and Budget, and titled "Air Conditioning and Warm Air Heating Equipment and Commercial and Industrial Refrigeration Equipment." The industry includes establishments primarily manufacturing such equipment, as well as soda fountains, humidifiers, and dehumidifiers.

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