This report provides a profile of the Manufacturing industry and its workforce, focusing on the sectors in which low-paid employees are relatively concentrated.

Topics covered include industry structure and performance, the Manufacturing labour market, and earnings and wage instruments. 

Manufacturing has a mixture of low and high-paying sectors. There are considerable differences in the structure of firms between the low and high-paying sectors, with firms in the low-paying sectors more likely to be small and labour intensive. Activity has been shifting away from the industry; over the past three decades, output growth in Manufacturing has been slower than for all other non-farm industries, while total employment has been stagnant since the early 1990s. In particular, there has been a large fall in both output and employment in the Textile, clothing, footwear and leather manufacturing subdivision. Manufacturing does not have a high percentage of employees that are paid the award rate of pay; however, in terms of hourly wage rates adult employees in Manufacturing tend to be slightly more concentrated towards the lower end of the wage distribution than adult employees as a whole.