The National Employment Law Project (NELP) has found that manufacturing production wages in the United States are now in the bottom half of all jobs, with the median wage for production workers in 2013 being $15.66. This is a significant decrease from decades past when production workers in manufacturing earned wages significantly higher than the U.S. average. Additionally, since 1989, there has been a significant increase in hiring of frontline production workers through temporary staffing agencies, where the wages are often lower and the work more precarious. As a result, working Americans rely on public assistance programs funded by U.S. taxpayers to close the gap.
