An Industrial Economy

Manufacturing and industrial firms experienced falling sales, accumulating inventories, and increasing labor unrest. Firms cut back orders of raw materials, laid of thousands, and tried to reduce inventories. The primary industrial firms are food processing, meat packing, construction machinery, printing and publishing, agricultural implements, iron and steel, fabricated metals, and electrical instruments. Caterpillar Tractor Company of Peoria is the third largest in sales among Illinois firms, second in industrial employment, and first in exports, with more than S3 billion exported annually. The political structure in Metro-East is so complex that bistate cooperation on economic development for the SMSA has only recently begun. New large industries were no longer forced to locate near coal since they could buy power from centralized electric power plants to which coal was hauled. The majority of industrial employees in the Wood River cluster of towns work outside of that city.