The Effect of the Depression on Multiplant Manufacturing Organizations
Size of manufacturing organizations has at least two aspects, one, the magnitude of the individual manufacturing units or plants, and the other, the extent of operating combinations composed of two or more such establishments. Since the middle of the last century the Bureau of the Census has been publishing figures from which fairly definite knowledge of the changes in size of establishments may be obtained. The second classification, that one which has to do with the nature and extent of multiplant groups, is made by the Bureau primarily to facilitate its canvass of manufacturing establishments. The assemblage of records covering these industrial combinations grew out of the necessity of obtaining census returns from the principal offices of those multiplant organizations in which the subsidiary manufacturing units were not authorized to furnish data called for by the census. No separate compilation of data for those manufacturing plants which were members of multiplant groups found its way into the regularly published reports of the Bureau prior to the census for 1929. These data, however, were used by Mr. Willard Thorp in the preparation of the census monograph entitled Integration of Industrial Operation, published in 1924, which dealt with the nature and scope of multiplant manufacturing combinations. Volume I of the reports of the census of manufactures for 1929 will present for the first time in the section on character of ownership general statistics, by industries, classified by multiplant and single-plant concerns. The Thorp monograph disclosed the existence in 1919 of 5,838 multiplant combinations which controlled at least 8 per cent of all manufacturing establishments, in which more than one-third of all wage earners engaged in manufacturing industry were employed. These establishments produced, it was estimated, about one-third of the total manufactured output. Approximately five-eighths of the multiplant groups were simple combinations, each in control of factories all of which were found in a single industry, while the remainder operated vertically integrated plants and other more complex types. The multiplant records at that time were somewhat incomplete because of the fact that a good many manufacturing establishments which were members of these groups reported direct to the Census Bureau, so that no central-office records were needed for these companies. By 1929