America's force of skilled white-collar workers overtook the ranks of skilled blue-collar workers in the 1980s for the first time.
There were 36.6 million executives, professionals and technicians in 1990, the Census Bureau said Thursday. That was one worker in three, compared with one in four 10 years earlier.There were 27.8 million skilled workers making or transporting goods - one worker in five, compared with one in four a decade earlier.
Other sorts of jobs showed little change during the decade. One worker in eight held a service job, such as cooks, police officers, maids, barbers and nannies. That was about the same as 10 years earlier.
Farmers and farm workers accounted for less than 3 percent of the work force, also barely changed during the decade.
One worker in 25 held a job requiring little education or training, such as construction laborer, stock handler or garbage collector. In 1980, one in 20 held those jobs.
Economists say the effects of the recession that began in mid-1990 may have slowed the growth in white-collar jobs since then. The recession placed large numbers of workers at risk of losing their jobs or having their pay cut without the protection of a union contract, said Malcolm Cohen, director of the Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations at the University of Michigan.
Since the last recession struck, "people who have never been laid off before are experiencing layoffs for the first time," Cohen said.
As a result, organized labor sees an opportunity to add to its membership, as the growing numbers of white-collar workers, battered by hard times, turn to unions to protect their jobs.
"I don't think it is going to be something that happens overnight, but over a period of years I think we're going to see more and more of this," said Markley Roberts, an AFL-CIO economist.
The 1990 Census also found these changes from a decade earlier:
- Women in precision production, craft and repair work, up 20 percent.
- Women executives, administrators and managers, up 95 per-cent.
- Size of the work force, 124 million, up 18 percent.
- Size of the population, 248 million, up 10 percent.
- Whites in the work force, up 12 percent; blacks, up 23 percent; Hispanics, up 67 percent; Asians and Pacific Islanders, up 106 percent; American Indians, Eskimos and Aleuts, up 45 percent.