LABOUR RESOURCES – HISTORICAL COMPARISON OF PRODUCTION-LINE VERSUS ALL EMPLOYED IN MANUFACTURING LIVING-WAGE EQUALISATION INDICES 1996-2009

The Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labour issued annual reports of hourly compensation costs for production-line workers (PLWs) in manufacturing all the way back to 1975. However, beginning with the 2010 data, the annual report incorporates all employed in the manufacturing (AEM) sector, and the BLS will no longer publish reports for production workers only. For this reason, Jus Semper has prepared the comparative assessment of production workers' compensation costs vis-à-vis those of all employed in manufacturing (which includes production workers). This provides an estimate of the gap between compensation costs for AEM and PLWs for 28 countries. This allows analysts to assess the average gap for all countries combined as well as to identify the countries with gaps significantly greater or smaller than the mean for all countries. Unfortunately, annual comparisons cannot date back to 1975, for the data for AEM starts in 1996. It should be noted that the gaps in this case do not have a negative implication per se, for PLWs earn generally less than the average for all employed in manufacturing, which includes managerial and executive levels. Yet when the gap is greater than average it indicates that PLWs are compensated at substantially lower rates than they generally are on average in the 28 countries in this assessment.

On average the hourly compensation cost (wage rate) for PLWs amounts to 82,6% of the cost for AEM between 1996 and 2009 (or a gap of 17,4 percentage points).
Download the 1996-2009 Aequss Index assessment for All Employees vis-à-vis production workers here!**