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Rh EMPLOYMENT POSSIBILITIES IN HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION

Relation of construction expenditure and employment.—As bases for an estimate of the employment that may be afforded by all highway construction and maintenance and particularly by construction of the interregional system after the war, appendix VII gives in table 2 the actual man-months of direct employment on Federal, Federal-aid, and independent State highway construction and on highway maintenance by the States, by months from 1931 to 1942, inclusive, and in table 3, the same employment by yearly and 4-year periods. For comparison with these employment figures, table 4 in appendix VII shows for the same series of years and periods, the annual expenditures of the Federal and State Governments for the construction and maintenance work on which the employment recorded in tables 2 and 3 was afforded.

From the data included in these basic tables, expenditures per man-year of direct employment on construction and maintenance work and on both classes of work combined in the proportions which actually existed, have been computed, and are given in table 26.

It will be noted that in 1934 the expenditure to provide a man-year of direct employment on Federal and State highway construction was just above $2,000, whereas in the latest complete war year this figure had been almost trebled. The variation in the expenditure for direct highway employment is affected both by administrative policy and the state of the national economy. The low point of depression produced the lowest expenditure Pe man-year of direct employment, partly as a result of a general deflation of wages and prices. But policy limitations of hours of work designed to spread employment and wage ceilings fixed for various classes of work, also operated to