Source: US BLS - all data is seasonally adjusted.
The charts above are from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Statistics Survey. They show total manufacturing employment and the number of production workers growing during the late 1990s. There is then a very pronounced reduction in manufacturing employment between 2000 and 2004 followed by a more gradual reduction in total employment and a slight increase in the number of production workers.
The average hourly earning across the entire manufacturing sector has shown a steady increase over the period from 1992 to 2007, but of course with the more recent reductions in total manufacturing employment that means that manufacturers have been able to hold payroll cost steady even while output has been rising.
