From the US Business and Industry Council:
http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3061
The Decline of American Manufacturing: Manufacturing and Service Wages Converge Downward
Alan Tonelson
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
U.S. WAGE TRENDS
Average hourly manufacturing wage, August, 2008: $8.00* ** ***
Average private service sector wage, August, 2008: $8.03
Last time average private service wages exceeded manufacturing wages: May, 1974
Change in average real private service wage, May, 1974 to present: –4.97%
Change in average real manufacturing wage, May, 1974 to present: –5.38%
* Measured in 1982 dollars
** All wage figures seasonally adjusted
*** Both August figures preliminary
Source: Calculated from “Multi-screen Data Search, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/dsrv?ce
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press).
Hey guy, we can't run a business on that kind of stuff. I mean, nobody here's about to start manufacturing say, sackcloth and ashes because the doom sector just isn't there.
OK, USBIC drivel is great for parties and threads like this, but serious stuff like earning a living means hard facts: headcounts, bank tallies, shipping manifests. Maybe years ago nobody had access that this kind of stuff, but now we got no excuses.