A Tale of Employment Decline in Two Cities: How Bad Was the Worst of Times?

This paper describes the communitywide effects on employment, earnings, and labor mobility of the severe employment declines that occurred in major industries in the Buffalo, New York and Providence, Rhode Island SMSAs in the period 1960 – 70. The author analyzes the work histories, drawn from longitudinal Social Security Administration data files, of about 20,000 men with job experience in those years and SMSAs. A major finding is that voluntary separations exceeded employment reductions in nearly all industries, indicating that, contrary to popular belief, relatively few workers in those cities were forced out of their jobs. In addition, the workers studied were very mobile; about one-third of job changers migrated out of their original SMSA, and many changers moved into different industries. Some workers who lost their jobs suffered severe earnings loss, but the total earnings loss was not particularly large. The author discusses the policy implications of those findings.