Labor Intensive

Describing an industry or sector in which it is difficult to produce a good or service without a large amount of labor. Labor intensive industries require either a large number of employees or a large number of hours worked by employees, or both, in order to be successful. Labor intensity may be quantified by taking a ratio of the cost of labor (i.e. wages and salaries) as a proportion of the total capital cost of producing the good or service. The higher the ratio, the higher the labor intensity. Labor intensive industries may control costs in bad economies by laying off workers. Examples of labor intensive industries include agriculture, mining, and hospitality.

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References in periodicals archive

The more labor intensive the process, like hand carving, the greater the advantage is to import, Burgette said.

Broyhill Building Bigger Import Facility

At first huge fortunes will be made; then, as the labor demand rises, economic equality will increase; there will follow the predictable collapse of the labor market as the information industries become more and more cost efficient, smaller and smaller on the world's horizon, less and less labor intensive, and finally less capital hungry and less profitable, leaving a few cash cows providing all the world's needs.

Worlds without ends

Labor intensive service businesses (e.g., restaurants) may have non-highly compensated, unskilled employees who become "management" under this definition causing a failure to qualify as a SLOB.

Comments on proposed QSLOB regulations under section 414(r)

Staffed with highly experienced engineers, FS&D offers both ferrous and non-ferrous foundries professional assistance in rationalizing labor intensive processes by mechanization and automation in order to become competitive.

Foundry engineering/consulting

"In the period before the landmark preservation movement, it was common practice to 'modernize' historic elements by replacing them with newer, less labor intensive materials and finishes.

Back to the future for 1359 B'way

These systems arc said to eliminate the need for labor intensive manual scrubbing and caustic chemicals by removing residues from surfaces while they are hot, energized and in place.

Dry ice blasting. (Equipment)

But harvesting spider silk is labor intensive. Spiders must be tied down and their silk reeled out using a small motor.

Silkworms coerced to make better silk. (Spinning Fine Threads)

Finding and correcting any errors in the database can be labor intensive, said Al Alton, the Chief of Documentation at the 841st.

Good loadout begins with the stow planning. (ICODES)

Why you should care: FlexSeal 2520 features an integral hook and loop closure along its edges that eliminates the labor intensive process of taping the convolute after the wire harness has been inserted.

Hook and Loop Convolute. (In Gear)

By the mid-1990s, we knew that distributed computing and its management was often significantly more expensive, created redundancy, and was more labor intensive than managing resources centrally.

Enterprise Application Integration & SAN

Financing 80/20 projects is highly labor intensive and takes specialized knowledge.

SBO arranges $104m financing for 80/20 residential project