September 6, 2000 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Changes in average weekly hours, 1964-99
From 1964 to 1999,
all of the major goods-producing industries—mining, construction, and
manufacturing—added hours to their average workweeks. In contrast, all
of the major service-producing industries lost hours from their workweeks.
![Average weekly hours of production/nonsupervisory workers, by industry, 1964 and 1999](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120925080001im_/http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2000/Sept/wk1/art02.gif)
[Chart data—TXT]
In both mining and construction, average
weekly hours per job rose by 1.9 hours between 1964 and 1999; in mining,
the average workweek was the longest of all the industries in 1999, at
43.8 hours. The average workweek went up by 1 hour in manufacturing in the
1964-99 period, from 40.7 to 41.7 hours.
Among service-producing industries, the
biggest decline by far in weekly hours was in retail trade, from 37 hours
in 1964 to 29 hours in 1999. Finance, insurance, and real estate had the
smallest drop in hours, from 37.3 to 36.2 hours.
This information is from the BLS Current
Employment Statistics program. For
each industry, average weekly hours is computed by dividing the sum of
reported paid hours by the total number of production or nonsupervisory
workers in the industry. Changes in average weekly hours in an industry
can be due to various reasons; for example, there could be a shift in an
industry to employing more part-time workers. Learn more about average
weekly hours in "On the decline in average weekly hours worked"
by Katie Kirkland, Monthly Labor Review, July 2000.
Of interest
Spotlight on Statistics: National Hispanic Heritage Month
In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
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Read more »