604Chapter 30
jobs in fields such as manufacturing, heavy industry,
mining, construction, and energy. It is typically manual
labor—blue-collar work—paid by hourly or daily
wages. The service sector has long included such
smaller categories as banking and insurance, commerce
and trade, journalism and communications, and a grow-
ing list of public employees. Employment in the service
sector often requires more education and rarely requires
physical labor; it is usually white-collar work performed
in offices (see illustration 30.3). Service employees
typically (but not universally) receive an annual or
monthly salary, however many hours they work, fre-
quently adding up to better total compensation.
One of the areas of most rapid growth in the ser-
vice economy of the twentieth century has been gov-
ernment employment. This category is much larger
than the image of anonymous bureaucrats filling the of-
fices of a national capital. Millions of public school
teachers or postal workers are also employees of the
tertiary sector. The French Ministry of Education em-
ployed 121,000 people in 1896 and more than 1 mil-
lion people in 1984; in the same years, the French
Ministry of Posts grew from 70,000 workers to
513,000. Thus, in a century during which the popula-
tion of France increased by less than 44 percent, em-
ployees in one ministry increased by 768 percent and in
another by 639 percent. The police, the judicial sys-
tem, and—a natural consequence of taxing to finance
all of the others—the Ministry of Finance also grew
much faster than population did.
The service sector was already an important part of
the European economy at the start of the twentieth
century, but it was clearly tertiary. In 1910, for example,
41 percent of German labor was employed in industry,
37 percent in agriculture, and 22 percent in service.
The service sector accounted for 26 percent of employ-
ment in France and only 18 percent of employment in
Italy that year. European employment data for 1930
show that different economies coexisted in Europe:
Poland remained a traditional, rural economy with 66
percent of the population employed in agriculture; Ger-
many remained a strongly industrial economy, with 40
percent of employment there, 29 percent in agriculture,
and 31 percent in service; Britain revealed the emerging
pattern of the twentieth-century economy with only 6
percent of labor in agriculture and slightly more work-
ers in the service sector (48 percent) than the industrial
(46 percent).
The growth of the tertiary economy chiefly oc-
curred after World War II. By 1980, 61 percent of all
workers in Sweden were in the service sector. More
than 50 percent of employment in Britain, France, and
Germany were in service. Meanwhile agricultural em-
ployment had fallen to less than 10 percent of the la-
bor force in Britain (3 percent), Germany (4 percent),
Sweden (5 percent), France (8 percent), and Austria (9
percent). Thus, industrial employment still remained
important in all European economies, but nowhere
did it account for a majority of the labor force, as it
had in Britain in 1910 (52 percent). In somePercentage of working population
Country 1910 1930 1950 1960 1980
Ag. Ind. Ser. Ag. Ind. Ser. Ag. Ind. Ser. Ag. Ind. Ser. Ag. Ind. Ser.
Britain 9 52 40 6 46 48 5 49 46 4 48 48 3 42 56
France 41 33 26 36 33 31 27 36 37 22 39 39 8 39 53
Germany 37 41 22 29 40 31 23 43 38 14 48 38 4 46 50
Greece 50 16 3 4 5 416 30 51 21 28 56 20 2 437 28 35
Italy 55 27 18 47 31 22 42 32 26 31 40 29 11 45 44
Poland 77 9 1 466 17 17 5 426 20 48 29 23 31 39 30
Sweden 49 32 19 39 36 25 21 41 38 14 45 41 5 34 61
Note: Data for Greece and Poland for 1910 are post–World War I data, c. 1920. Data for Germany for 1950, 1960, and 1980 are for West Germany only.
Ag. Agriculture; Ind. Industry; Ser. Service.TABLE 30.6The Socioeconomic Structure of Twentieth-Century Europe