ABSTRACT
This chapter describes one approach to mapping the areas of the United States into an exhaustive and mutually exclusive set of local labor markets. It deals with the former task because an appropriate partitioning of space must logically and empirically come before the task of describing those spatial units. The local labor market is a key source of inequality. It explores a mix of national, regional, and particularistic labor processes. The local labor market also consists of an opportunity structure influenced in part by national and regional macroeconomic forces and also by the local social and economic organization of production. Local labor markets vary along many dimensions, including industry mix, union density, presence of defense installations and/or contractors, and skill levels of workers. The commuting zones and labor market areas developed with the 1980 census data have been employed by researchers in a variety of ways.
