1980 HUNGARIAN CENSUS OF POPULATION Summary data (1984)

VI. THE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DAILY COMMUTING ACTIVE EARNERS

VI. The main characteristics of the daily commuting active earners THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NUMBER AND THE DEMOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE OF THE COMMUTERS At the beginning of 1980 1 million 218 thousand active earners - almost one fourth of all active earners - went to work daily to a settlement different from the settlement of their place of residence, or in other words commuted. The number of daily commuters increased almost twofold in the past two decades, in the meantime the number of active earners grew by slightly more than 6 percent. The development of the number and composition of commuters showed diverse tendencies in the past two decades, which is closely connected to the alteration of the social-economic structure, and to the differences in the spatial distribution of the source of labour force and the working places. The commuting as a mass phenomenon was brought about by the first great wave of the socialist industrialization. At the time of the forced pace industrialization of the fifties in addition to the intensive social mobility - within this first of all the outflow from agriculture to industry - and the growing migration, the role of daily commuting became more and more considerable. In 1960 the number of commuters was 636 thousand. In 1970 the number of commuters was 977 thousand, this means one fifth of all active earners (contrary to the 13 percent ten years earlier). In the seventies the number of commuters increased by further 241 thousand. This means that parallel with the 1. 6 percent moderate increase in the number of all active earners, the number of commuters rose relatively considerably by 2 5 percent in the course of ten years. This is related - among others - to the expansion of the employment possibilities in the country, which is in correspondence with the settlement development program aims: the more proportionate formation of industrial areas, the development of trade and various services. This meant the formation of different rural centrums - in addition to the capital and other industrial areas - which were not based on the labour force source of one single settlement but on the labour force source of a group of settlements. So the labour supply of the various industrial and infra structural centrums were not based only on local sources, but also on the labour sources of the surrounding settlements. The merging of the agricultural cooperatives of more villages also caused an increase in the number of commuters, since the working places of a cooperative are in more villages and part of the workers have to commute daily. The 241 thousand growth in the number of commuters since 197 0 was split half-half between men and women, while in the same time the number of active earner men decreased by 67 thousand, and the number of active earner women increased by 147 thousand. As a result of this the proportion of women rose since 197 0 both among the commuters and among all active earners (the growth was from 28 percent to 32 percent among the former and from 41 percent to 43 percent among the latter), but the proportion of the men is still much higher (68 percent) among the commuters than among the active earners (57 percent). 109