(What’s Left of) Our Economy: America’s Real Wage Recession Continues, and Manufacturing Pay Hits a Downbeat Milestone

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inflation-adjusted wages, manufacturing, private sector, recession, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Although this morning’s data from the Labor Department showed that the inflation-adjusted wages picture brightened marginally in June, they also revealed that two underlying trends on the American compensation front remained as discouraging as ever – especially in manufacturing. Further, the statistics confirmed that real hourly pay in industry has reached a milestone that factory workers clearly won’t want to celebrate.

The two underlying trends have to do with the technical real wage recessions (two or more consecutive quarters of net decline) that private sector workers overall, and their manufacturing counterparts, continue to suffer.

For the former, constant dollar hourly pay is down on net since last July – by 0.19 percent. For manufacturing, the real wage recession began two-and-one half years ago. Since January, 2016, after -inflation hourly wages are off by 0.09 percent.

The milestone? Real hourly pay in manufacturing has lately been performing so much worse than pay in the overall private sector that the two figures have now converged for the first time since these statistics have been tracked (beginning in 2006).

In May, price-adjusted wages in manufacturing and the overall private sector both stood at $10.75 per hour in 1982-84 dollars. This morning, those preliminary May readings remained intact, and the preliminary June numbers revealed both categories of workers to be earning $10.76 per hour in real terms.

By comparison, when the last recession began, at the end of 2007, constant dollar manufacturing wages topped their overall private sector counterparts by 2.79 percent. When the current recovery began, in mid-2009, the gap had actually grown – to 3.98 percent.

But during the current expansion, real private sector wages have now improved by 4.36 percent, whereas in manufacturing, constant dollar hourly pay is up only 0.37 percent – less than a tenth as fast.

On a sequential basis, real wages in manufacturing and the overall private sector both increased in June by 0.09 percent. On an annual basis, however, real private sector wages are flat, and real manufacturing wages are down 1.10 percent.

Between the previous Junes, constant dollar private sector wages advanced by 0.84 percent, and their manufacturing counterparts climbed by 0.46 percent.

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(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Manufacturing Job Creation Softened a Bit in May; Wages (Literally) Went Nowhere

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Employment, inflation-adjusted wages, Jobs, manufacturing, non-farm jobs, private sector, recession, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I was on some travel yesterday and couldn’t put out my usual same-day, post. But here’s my analysis of the latest monthly (May) manufacturing figures contained in that morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

>U.S. manufacturing job creation shifted into a somewhat lower gear in May, with its 18,000 sequential gain the smallest such improvement since last September’s 6,000. Revisions left the last February through April monthly totals unchanged on net.

>Worse news, moreover, came on the manufacturing wages front. Pre-inflation hourly pay flat-lined on month in May – its worst such results since last November’s similar performance. In addition, April’s previously reported 0.15 percent monthly manufacturing constant dollar wage gain was revised down to 0.15 percent.

>By contrast, overall current dollar private sector wages saw their best monthly improvement (0.30 percent) since December’s 0.38 percent.

>As a result, May’s year-on-year manufacturing wage improvement before inflation totaled only 1.85 percent. Between the previous Mays, pre-inflation manufacturing wages advanced by 2.12 percent.

>These increases also lagged those for the overall private sector, where current dollar wages rose by 2.71 percent on year in May. That was the best such performance since January’s 2.77 percent. And it exceeded the 2.46 percent private sector wage gain between May, 2016 and May, 2017.

>Consequently, the wage gap between manufacturing and the overall private sector widened significantly between last May and this. As of last May, during the current economic recovery, pre-inflation private sector wages had increased 21.24 percent faster than manufacturing wages. This May, the difference was up to 28.13 percent.

>Despite May’s somewhat weaker manufacturing employment growth, the sector’s share of total non-farm employment (the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U.S. jobs universe) remained at just under 8.53 percent. Last May, manufacturing accounted for just under 8.49 percent of total non-farm employment, meaning that during the last year, manufacturing payrolls have grown slightly faster than American payrolls in general.

>In fact, manufacturing’s May year-on-year job creation (259,000) was a tremendous improvement from the figure between the previous Mays (78,000) and the best annual gain since May, 1998’s 262,000.

>Over the longer-term, however, manufacturing remains a significant job-creation laggard. Since it’s latest employment bottom, in February and March, 2010, it’s regained 1.22 million (53.21 percent) of the 2.293 million jobs lost during the recession and its immediate aftermath.

>The overall private sector lost 8.780 million jobs from the year-end 2007 onset of the recession through February, 2010. Since then, it’s created 19.086 million net new jobs.

>Moreover, since the recession’s onset, the private sector has boosted its employment by 8.88 percent. But manufacturing payrolls are still down 7.81 percent from their December, 2007 levels.

>Manufacturing has been an even worse real wage laggard. The latest inflation-adjusted data go through April, and show that manufacturing couldn’t even match the monthly flat-line in private sector wages. In manufacturing, pay between March and April dipped by 0.09 percent.

>Year-on-year, private sector after-inflation wages inched up only 0.19 percent in April, but even that negligible growth handily beat manufacturing’s 1.10 percent decline. Between the previous April’s inflation-adjusted manufacturing wages improved by 0.55 percent.

>Indeed, both the private sector and manufacturing continue to experience technical real wage recessions (periods of cumulative shrinkage lasting at least two quarters). But in the private sector, such pay is off only 0.09 percent since last May. In manufacturing, real wages are down by this amount since January, 2016.

>And whereas private sector wages are up 4.17 percent in real terms during the current economic recovery (which is nearly nine years old), their manufacturing counterpart gained only 0.37 percent – less than a tenth as much.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Industries Claiming Labor Shortages are Productivity as Well as Wage Laggards

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compensation, Labor Department, labor productivity, labor shortages, productivity, restaurants, trucking, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The labor shortage claims from American businesses keep filling the media (even though wages, which are supposed to rise sharply in such circumstances, are improving only sluggishly). So it was more than a little interesting to look over the latest statistics on labor productivity released by the Department of Labor.

After all, companies and industries really facing dire labor shortages, and unwilling or unable to raise wages, are supposed to boost their productivity (generally by introducing labor-saving devices and practices). But the new Labor Department numbers show that they’re doing surprisingly little on this front, either.

Let’s examine two sectors of the economy that say with special vigor that they’re running out of workers: trucking and restaurants.

According to a typical account (from yesterday’s Washington Post), American trucking companies are facing “an extraordinary labor shortage” and their CEOs (including industry veterans) are saying things like “I’ve never seen it like this, ever….It doesn’t matter what the load even pays. There are just not drivers.”

The sector does appear to be raising pay. But not until the last two years have its overall employment costs been rising faster than those for the private sector overall – and the latter’s increases have hardly impressed. These data cover the entire transportation and warehousing sector, but after shooting up from a 2.1 percent annual pre-inflation pace to four percent (between the fourth quarters of 2011 and 2012), total compensation advances slowed to 2.3 percent annually during the next two years, and then to 2.2 percent in 2015 before accelerating.

Moreover, trucking industry productivity growth hasn’t been world-beating, either. The Labor Department reported last week that its overall gain in labor productivity (the narrower of two productivity growth measures tracked by Labor, but the one whose data is more up to date) in 2017 was 0.8 percent. A comparable figure for services industries in general isn’t available, but the Department does track labor productivity for non-farm businesses and for manufacturing.

Since labor productivity productivity for the former increased by 1.3 percent in 2017 and only 0.4 percent in manufacturing, it seems safe to conclude that services sector labor productivity grew by more than 1.3 percent – and therefore much more than trucking’s 0.8 percent. Nor does this picture change much going back to 2013.

Further, a remarkably similar pattern emerges upon examining the restaurant business. Labor shortages are widely claimed and reported, along with examples of the industry starting to improve compensation practices. New technologies are also apparently being tried to improve efficiency in the sector. But according to the data, these responses to the purported shortage of workers have been belated at best.

For example, as with trucking, annual total compensation gains in the accommodation and food services sectors (no restaurant-specific numbers are available) trailed those for the overall private sector for several years until 2016. And their owners and lobbyists have been making labor shortage claims for at least that long.

Data for restaurants (and bars) specifically are available for their labor productivity, and their performance here is only roughly comparable to the dreary results for non-manufacturing non-farm businesses.

Industries like trucking and restaurants may indeed not be able to choose their employees from as many applicants as they would like, or from numbers to which they’ve become accustomed. But if they haven’t been doing anything special, at least until recently either to hike pay, improve productivity, or both, then several explanations are possible. Maybe they’re waiting for another wave of wage-depressing legal and illegal immigrants to save their days without the need to fatten paychecks of invest in new plant and equipment. Maybe they’re don’t know how to improve productivity in particular, in which case, their businesses simply may not be viable, or they’re simply lousy managers.

But unless the Labor Department figures are completely off-base, one explanation we can rule out completely is that, as groups, they’re utterly desperate for workers.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Deepening Mystery of Trump’s NAFTA Strategy

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autos, Canada, light trucks, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, Nick Carey, North American Free Trade Agreement, Reuters, ROO, rules of origin, tariffs, Trade, Trump, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Trump administration’s approach to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) keeps getting murkier. And although I agree that keeping the other parties to a negotiation off balance from time to time, and holding cards close to one’s vest, can be excellent tactics, the latest apparent twist in American policy doesn’t appear to be explained by such considerations.

Let’s start with the excellent insight contained in a Reuters article today about one of the centerpieces of NAFTA reform identified by the administration – the rules of origin (ROO) for autos and other light-duty passenger vehicles. These treaty provisions have been rightly targeted by Team Trump negotiators from the standpoint of U.S. interests because motor vehicles and parts comprise such a large percentage of the goods exchanged throughout North America, and because since NAFTA went into effect, contrary to its supporters’ promises, the American automotive sector has become less, not more globally competitive.

The NAFTA ROO are ostensibly aimed at encouraging automotive manufacturing inside North America and currently require that 62.5 percent of a vehicle’s value come from within the free trade zone in order to be exempted from tariffs. The administration’s response is widely described as a toughening of these rules because it would raise this threshold to 75 percent.

But there’s always been one huge catch that I’ve been tweeting about consistently: Unless the tariff penalty imposed on vehicle and parts-makers outside North America is greatly increased, boosting the duty-free content threshold will have little impact on these companies’ production and employment decisions. The reason? The current NAFTA external tariff on these products is only 2.5 percent. (Just FYI, this point was first made during the original NAFTA debate, in this Economic Strategy Institute study to which I contributed modestly.)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Wage Inflation is Everywhere Except the Real Wage Figures

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Federal Reserve, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, Labor Department, manufacturing, private sector, real wages, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

This morning was a bad one for observers of the U.S. economy who keep insisting that wage inflation is either here or around the corner. That means it was also a bad morning for American workers. For the new Labor Department figures on wages adjusted for inflation showed no change – at best – in the historically sluggish constant dollar paycheck increases that employees have seen for most of the current economic recovery.

These new data figures bring the story up through April, when the Department says after-inflation hourly wages were unchanged on month in the private sector, and slipped 0.09 percent in manufacturing. In fact, both numbers represent deceleration from March – when real private sector wages increased sequentially by a downwardly revised 0.28 percent, and real manufacturing wages rose by a downwardly revised 0.19 percent.

Most analysts take the year-on-year numbers more seriously, because they exhibit less random fluctuation. But if anything, they make the wage inflation meme look even loonier. Since last April, price-adjusted private sector wages are up a grand total of 0.19 percent, and in manufacturing, actually down by fully 1.10 percent.

Between the previous Aprils, moreover, inflation-adjusted wages improved by 0.28 percent in the private sector, and by 0.55 percent in manufacturing. For good measure, the latest April yearly decrease in constant dollar manufacturing wages was the biggest since October, 2012’s 2.09 percent drop.

And throughout the current recovery, which is approaching its ninth anniversary, inflation-adjusted private sector wages have advanced by 4.01 percent, while their manufacturing counterparts have inched up only 0.37 percent.

It’s true of course that broader measures of American worker compensation reveal greater improvement. But that’s not to say “great improvement.” Or even close. It’s also true that the Federal Reserve can cite any number of reasons to raise U.S. interest rates after many years at rock-bottom levels. The new real wage figures, however, make clear that wage inflation isn’t yet one of them.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Manufacturing Jobs Growth Stays Strong, but Where are the Wages?

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Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation-adjusted wages, Jobs, Labor Department, manufacturing, non-farm payrolls, recession, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

According to this morning’s Labor Department jobs report, April was another month of impressive employment gains and sluggish wage growth in manufacturing. Industry added 24,000 net new jobs on month and revisions left recent months’ solid employment growth intact. Further, manufacturing payrolls’ yearly rate of expansion quickened in April (to 245,000) and was still the best such performance since May, 1998’s 262,000. In fact, manufacturing jobs continued their recent trend of increasing faster than overall employment, with their share of non-farm jobs growing from 8.49 percent last April to 8.53 percent.

Yet pre-inflation manufacturing wages advanced by only 0.15 percent on month in April and March’s figure was revised down slightly. Worse, on an annual basis, current dollar manufacturing hourly pay growth fell to 1.36 percent – the slowest such rate since June, 2015’s 1.25 percent. And in inflation-adjusted terms, manufacturing wages are still in technical recession, having fallen on net by 0.28 percent since February, 2016.

Here’s my analysis of the latest monthly (April) manufacturing figures contained in this morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

>American manufacturing’s robust net job creation extended into April, yet swelling payrolls continued having little impact on the sector’s weak wage growth.

>Domestic manufacturers boosted payrolls by 24,000 in April. March’s 22,000 monthly jobs increase was left unrevised, and February’s previously reported 32,000 sequential improvement was downgraded to 31,000.

>Industry’s employment performance was even better on an annual basis. From April, 2017 to April, 2018, manufacturing added 245,000 net jobs – its best such performance since May, 1998’s 262,000.

>Between the previous Aprils, industry created 54,000 net new jobs.

>Further, manufacturing employment continued its recent trend of growing even faster than overall U.S. employment. Last April, manufacturing jobs accounted for 8.49 percent of all American non-farm employment (the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U.S. employment universe). This April, their share stood at 8.53 percent.

>Manufacturing has now regained 52.42 percent (1.202 million) of the 2.293 million jobs it lost since the late-2007 onset of the Great Recession through the sector’s employment bottom in February and March, 2010.

>But not even their recent hiring spurt has induced domestic manufacturers to raise pay significantly.

>April saw pre-inflation hourly pay in manufacturing increase by just 0.15 percent. In a break with recent trends, this sequential manufacturing wage gain matched that for the private sector overall.

>But manufacturing’s March monthly wage increase was revised down from 0.19 percent to 0.15 percent, and the April private sector figure represents a slowdown from March’s 0.22 percent – which was also downgraded (from 0.30 percent).

>Manufacturing wages performed even worse on an annual basis. Between this April and last, they rose by just 1.36 percent – the slowest such improvement since June, 2015’s 1.25 percent. From April, 2016 to April, 2017, they increased by 1.93 percent.

>As a result, since the start of the current economic recovery, in mid-2009, pre-inflation private sector wages have grown by 25.62 percent more than their manufacturing counterparts. Last April, the gap was considerably less: 18.72 percent.

>In real terms, manufacturing’s recent growth has been even less impressive.

>The latest inflation-adjusted data go through March, when its constant dollar pay rose by 0.19 percent – a downgrade from the initially reported 0.28 percent. Real monthly wage growth for the private sector in toto was downgraded for March, too – but from 0.37 percent to 0.28 percent.

>Year-on-year, real wages in April for manufacturing are actually down – by 0.65 percent. For the private sector overall, they were up 0.28 percent.

>In fact, manufacturing workers have suffered a technical recession in real wages (two straight quarters or more of cumulative decline) since February, 2016. During that more-than-two-year period, their inflation-adjusted hourly pay is off by 0.28 percent.

>The overall private sector is in real wage recession, too, but only since last May. Since then, its after-inflation hourly pay is down by 0.09 percent.

>Further, since the current recovery’s mid-2009 onset, overall real private sector wages have risen nearly ten times faster (4.17 percent) than real manufacturing wages (0.47 percent).

>Despite healthy recent growth, manufacturing remains a longer-term jobs laggard. As reported above, since the current economic recovery began in mid-2009, manufacturing has regained more than half the jobs it lost during the recession and its aftermath. But since shedding 8.780 million positions on net from December, 2007 through February, 2010, the private sector has created 18.856 million net new positions.

>From another perspective, manufacturing payrolls remain 7.94 percent below their immediate pre-recession (December, 2007) level of 13.746 million jobs. But overall private sector employment has risen 9.50 percent during that period.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Wage Inflation Claims are Still Grossly Inflated

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benefits, compensation, ECI, Employment Cost Index, inflation, salaries, wages, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you were examining whether American workers’ pay was finally beginning to rise at a rate consistent with a lengthy economic recovery and an apparently tight labor market, wouldn’t you focus on pay adjusted for inflation – which gauges whether these workers are keeping up with living costs? And wouldn’t you focus more on trends in the private sector (where wages, salaries, and benefits are set mainly by market forces, and therefore say something meaningful about the economy’s fundamentals) than in the public sector (where they’re set by government fiat)?

The alarm and enthusiasm (depending on your perspective) with which last week’s Labor Department figures on employment costs were greeted makes clear that both these best practices of economic analysis were widely ignored.

As the Department reported, the Employment Cost Index (ECI) – the compensation measure that includes all forms of pay and benefits – rose 2.71 percent on year in the first quarter of this year for “civilian workers.” That category includes the public sector, and was indeed the strongest such increase since 2008.

The numbers were even better in private industry: a 2.81 percent yearly gain. That’s also the best since 2008 (the third quarter’s 2.84 percent).

Adjust for inflation, though – that is, see the extent to which workers are staying ahead of living costs, not to mention the extent to which they are leading overall price rises – and the story looks very different.

According to the price-adjusted ECI issued by the Labor Department, during the first quarter of this year, compensation for civilian workers increased by 0.38 percent year-on-year. That’s actually lower than the annual increase for the previous quarter (0.48 percent). In fact, on a sequential (quarter-to-quarter) basis, the real ECI fell (by 0.29 percent).

That annual gain was indeed better than that for the first quarter of 2017 – when there was no increase in the inflation-adjusted ECI at all. But it wasn’t as good at the 0.87 percent improvement from the first quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2016. And it wasn’t even close to the 2.59 percent rise registered between the previous first quarters. So let’s recognize that, during the first quarter of 2018, the real ECI did nothing special – at best.

The story is just as unexciting – and contrary to accelerating wage inflation claims – in the private sector. Its real ECI increased by 0.39 percent annually during the first quarter, and also fell (by 0.19 percent) sequentially.

Between the previous first quarters, the real ECI flat-lined, too, after advancing by 0.97 percent the year before and 2.70 percent the year before that.

Some day, American workers may actually experience another genuine acceleration in their real compensation, and thus a genuine increase in their living standards. But looking at the most revealing version of the Employment Cost Index makes painfully clear that that day still lies in the future.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Historic Labor Shortages and Few Wage Hikes?

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Jobs, labor shortages, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Share of American companies with job openings amid “worst” skilled labor shortages in a decade: c. 90%

Share of these companies responding by “increasing pay”: c. one-third

(Source: “Open jobs, few takers: Good help hardest to find in a decade, hiring survey shows,” by Jeffry Bartash, Marketwatch.com, April 23, 2018, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/open-jobs-few-takers-good-help-hardest-to-find-in-a-decade-hiring-survey-shows-2018-04-23)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Another Month of U.S. Real Wage Recession

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2018 elections, inflation-adjusted wages, manufacturing, private sector, real wages, recovery, Trump, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Although this morning’s government data contained a bit of good news for Americans about their hourly wages, it also made clear that, when adjusted for inflation, they remain in technical recession for both the private sector as a whole, and for manufacturing in particular. Moreover, the gap between these two workforces keeps growing.

The good news concerned the real wages improvement that took place both in the private sector in toto and in manufacturing in March. For the former, they advanced by 0.37 percent – the best such performance since July 2015’s identical rise. For the latter, they grew by 0.28 percent – the best such performance since July, 2016’s 0.37 percent, and also the first sequential improvement since that month.

The January-February wage performances for both workforces were revised down – for the private sector from a flat-line to a 0.09 percent dip; for manufacturing, from a 0.09 percent decline to a 0.19 percent drop. But at least these downgrades were more than made up for in March.

Yet the recent upticks still left both private sectors overall and their manufacturing counterparts in real wage recessions – period of six months or more in which after-inflation hourly pay is down on net. For the private sector in general, price-adjusted wages are still 0.09 percent lower than they were last June. For manufacturing workers, these constant dollar wages are down by 0.28 percent since February, 2016.

As indicated by the wage recession figures, however, the long-time divergence between inflation-adjusted private sector and manufacturing wages continued in March, and in fact widened. On a year-on-year basis, real hourly pay is up 0.37 percent for the private sector in toto, but down by 0.65 percent in manufacturing.

Since the current economic recovery began, in mid-2009, the contrast is even greater. During this period, private sector workers’ hourly pay has kept 4.27 percent ahead of inflation. But manufacturing workers’ pay is up only 0.47 percent in real terms – only about 11 percent as much. Last March, the gap was smaller – real wage increases in manufacturing still badly lagged those in the private sector, but their gains were just under 29 percent as great as private sector increases.

The economy has been the issue on which voters have been giving President Trump his highest marks, and many indicators back up this judgment – including continued strong job creation (even when official unemployment is very low) and robust consumer confidence. But if pay keeps struggling to stay even with rising prices, it’s easy to see this Trump strength weakening as this year’s mid-term elections draw closer.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Jobs Still Surging and Wages Still Sputtering in Manufacturing

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Great Recession, inflation-adjusted wages, Jobs, manufacturing, non-farm payrolls, recovery, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Manufacturing’s payrolls kept growing strongly in March and industry’s wages kept growing weakly. Despite lackluster (103,000) job growth figures last month for the economy as a whole, factory employment increased by a healthy 22,000 on month and by 232,000 year-on-year – the best annual improvement since May, 1998 (262,000).

Moreover, over the past year, manufacturing’s share of total American employment rose from 8.49 percent last March to 8.52 percent last month, showing that industry’s employment growth has been exceeding that of the economy as a whole.

In sharp contrast, pre-inflation manufacturing wages improved sequentially by just 0.19 percent versus 0.30 percent for the private sector in toto. Industry’s wage lag was even worse year-on-year – 1.67 percent versus 2.72 percent for the entire private sector. And in real terms, manufacturing is even further behind the private sector eight ball, with its constant dollar hourly pay down on net since January, 2016 – meaning that it’s been in technical recession for more than two years.

Here’s my analysis of the latest monthly (March) manufacturing figures contained in yesterday morning’s employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

>In March, domestic U.S. manufacturers continued strongly boosting payrolls while keeping wages in check.

>Industry gained 22,000 jobs on month in March, and revisions to comparably robust January and February numbers were only slightly negative.

>On an annual basis, manufacturing employment rose by 232,000 – the best such performance since May, 1998’s 262,000. Between the previous Marches, U.S. domestic manufacturers added only 52,000 jobs on net.

>Manufacturing job growth has been so robust that it’s now outpacing overall U.S. job growth. Last March, manufacturing jobs accounted for 8.49 percent of all American non-farm employment (the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ U.S. Employment universe). This March, their share stood at 8.52 percent.

>Manufacturing has now regained 51.41 percent (1.179 million) of the 2.293 million jobs it lost since the late-2007 onset of the Great Recession through the sector’s employment bottom in February and March, 2010.

>Yet despite apparently robust demand for manufacturing workers, manufacturing employers apparently feel little pressure to compete for them by offering better pay.

>In March, once again, in pre-inflation terms, manufacturing’s sequential wage growth trailed that of the overall private sector – by 0.19 percent to 0.30 percent. Revisions, moreover, were slightly negative.

>On an annual basis, manufacturing wages performed just as poorly. They were up in March by just 1.67 percent, versus 2.72 percent for the overall private sector. Between the previous Marches, manufacturing wages advanced by 2.52 percent.

>As a result, since the start of the current economic recovery, in mid-2009, pre-inflation private sector wages have grown by 26.74 percent faster than manufacturing wages. A year ago, the gap was only 21.39 percent.

>Adjusting wages for inflation, moreover, continues to make manufacturing’s recent wage record even bleaker.

>The latest data go through February, but that month, inflation-adjusted pay in industry fell sequentially by 0.19 percent – a downgrade from the -0.09 percent figure initially reported. Real private sector pay’s monthly February performance was revised down a flat line to a 0.09 percent dip.

>Year-on-year, real wages are up only 0.28 percent in the private sector in toto, but even that meager number is far better than manufacturing’s 0.65 percent drop.

>And worse still, although both the private sector and manufacturing are still suffering real wage recessions, the former’s began only last April – with after-inflation hourly pay down 0.09 percent since then. For manufacturing, such pay is down 0.28 percent since January, 2016.

>Further, since the current recovery’s mid-2009 onset, overall real private sector wages have risen more than twenty times faster (3.88 percent) than manufacturing wages (0.19 percent).

>Over the longer term, moreover, manufacturing remains a significant jobs laggard, too. Although nearly nine years into the current economic recovery, industry has finally regained more than half the jobs it lost during the recession and its aftermath, the overall private sector has more than doubled its recessionary job losses. Since shedding 8.780 million positions on net from December, 2007 through February, 2010, it has created 18.654 million.

>From another perspective, manufacturing payrolls remain 8.10 percent below their immediate pre-recession level of 13.746 million jobs. But overall private sector employment has risen 8.50 percent during that period.