Labor · MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026
More Hours, Barely More Hands
The factory week is the longest since January 2019, while factory jobs have barely grown.
By Abe Lathrop. From MFGCalcs Magazine, Issue 1, November 2026, page 25.
In September the average production worker in American manufacturing was paid for a 42-hour week, four hours of it overtime, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. No factory week had been that long since January 2019.
The Kansas City Fed’s manufacturing contacts had increased hours, added overtime and extended shifts because workers were scarce, the bank reported in the Beige Book in October, and one of them named the bind: “It is hard to expand the workforce when they leave faster than you can replace them.”
Since the turn of 2024, when the factory week bottomed out, it has grown 1.7 hours, and factories employ about 220,000 fewer people, BLS data show.
Even in the nine months since December 2025, when employment hit its low, the week grew 0.9 hour and payrolls grew only 72,000: in percentage terms the week grew nearly four times as fast. September’s figures are the bureau’s first print and may yet change.
A plant that needs more output can ask the people it has to stay later, or it can hire. This year the country’s factories took the hours. What would make them hire instead, the data can only partly say: BLS counts hours, hires and quits, not reasons, and the regional Fed reports are what some firms told the banks, not a tally.
Say you run a plant with 50 production workers, and their hours and overtime have moved with the national averages since December 2025. You are now paying for 45 more hours a week than you were then, more than one full-time job of 40 hours, and a third of that added time is overtime. The 51st worker’s hours are already on the bill; the worker is not.
The hours make the easier case. They need no search and no training, and they come off the schedule when orders slow. Each hour has also bought more: in the second quarter, output per hour in manufacturing rose and the labor cost of each unit made fell, the bureau’s productivity figures show. A new hire is a bet that the orders will hold.
If the plant tries to hire, it has company. In July, factories had 576,000 jobs open, the most since December 2023, according to the bureau’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, and in August they still had about a quarter more than a year earlier. The hires have not kept up: so far this year, factories have hired the equivalent of about 2.4% of their payrolls each month, about last year’s pace and no faster than the average from 2001 through 2019. August’s 2.6% tied June for the year’s best month.
Then the hire has to stay. Factory workers have quit at an average rate of 1.4% a month this year, about the same as in the same months of 2025, though August’s rate was the highest since October 2024. A Texas machinery maker told the Dallas Fed in January what it does with a good hire: “Good people that fit our culture are hard to find. When we do find them, we keep them.”
Not every plant is short of hands. A Texas transportation equipment maker answering the same Dallas Fed survey in January found the opposite: “Hiring machinists, technicians and engineers is the easiest it’s been in many years due to contraction in the oil patch, which does not seem to be changing.”
Orders alone may not bring the hire. A manufacturer answering the Kansas City Fed’s survey in September had growth coming and another plan for it: “We have an increase in new business for the next year of over 30%. We will try to automate as much as possible to minimize the need for additional headcount.”
Nor has the hourly wage sped up. The average production worker’s rate in September was up 3.4% from a year earlier, by the bureau’s first print, the smallest gain since April 2021; weekly pay grew faster because the week had grown too. In the Cleveland Fed’s district, the bank reported in the Beige Book released in September, some manufacturers raised wages to compete for scarce workers or offered more overtime until they were fully staffed.
On the year’s evidence, the plant’s 51st worker waits on two things: orders that look like they will last longer than a search and a training take, and a wage that wins a worker who stays.
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Last reviewed 2026-10-26.