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Institute for Workplace Studies-----------------Professor Samuel B. Bacharach

School of Industrial & Labor Relations-------- Director, Institute for Workplace Studies

Cornell University

16 East 34th Street, 4th floor--------------------Stuart Basefsky

New York, NY 10016 -------------------------------Director, IWS News Bureau

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National Employment Law Project (NELP)

 

MANUFACTURING LOW PAY: DECLINING WAGES IN THE JOBS THAT BUILT AMERICA'S MIDDLE CLASS [20 November 2014]

by Catherine Ruckelshaus & Sarah Leberstein

http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Justice/2014/Manufacturing-Low-Pay-Declining-Wages-Jobs-Built-Middle-Class.pdf?nocdn=1

[full-text, 20 pages]

 

[excerpt]

This report will trace some of the drivers of this anemic rebound in manufacturing and its largest sector, auto

manufacturing. “Onshoring” of jobs by manufacturers is on the rise in the United States; jobs are rebounding

here due to a combination of a wage convergence between domestic and international jobs and aggressive

supports from U.S. states. At the same time, the decline in relative wages in the manufacturing sector is striking:

in the last decades, wages in the sector have fallen behind private-sector pay, so that wages for production

workers in manufacturing are now more than 4.0 percent less than the private-sector average, and they

continue to decline.

 

Contents

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1. Communities are racing to create “good jobs in manufacturing” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2. “Onshoring” has sparked a resurgence of U.S. manufacturing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

3. Manufacturing wages are in decline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

4. Case Study: The changing nature of automotive work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

5. Heavy reliance on staffing agencies obscures much deeper problems in manufacturing . . . . . . . . . 13

Conclusion....................................... 15

Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

 

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