Politicians have a favorite number. The trick is finding one that is true, flattering, and narrow enough that nobody checks what sits next to it.
Wage data makes that easy. The government publishes dozens of pay measures every month, covering hourly and weekly pay, managers and rank-and-file staff, factory floors and restaurant kitchens, with many of them also adjusted for inflation.
In a good year, most of those measures point in the same direction. In a rough year, they split apart, and whoever holds the microphone gets to choose which one you hear about.
This has been a rough year for your grocery and gas budget. Gasoline costs 27.4% more than it did a year ago, and the Federal Reserve just raised interest rates for the first time since 2023.
For most households, that combination adds up to a paycheck that buys a little less than it did last summer.
So when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went looking for good news about American wages on Monday, Sept. 21, he had to be choosy. He found two numbers that still look great, and both belong to people who build things for a living.
Why real wages matter more than the raise on your pay stub
A raise only counts if it outruns prices. Economists call what is left over “real” wages, and it is the closest thing the government has to a measure of whether your paycheck is truly growing.
Right now, that measure is flashing yellow. Real average hourly earnings for all private-sector employees fell 0.3% from August 2025 to August 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Rank-and-file workers, whom the BLS labels production and nonsupervisory employees, fared only slightly better. Their real hourly pay slipped 0.1% over the same 12 months.
Prices did the damage. Consumer prices rose 3.4% over the year through August, with energy costs up 16.3%, reported the BLS.
“Since April, prices have been climbing faster than average wages, so the typical worker’s paycheck doesn’t stretch as far as it used to,” NPR noted.
Bessent’s blue-collar wage numbers check out
“As wages continue to outpace inflation, real weekly earnings for blue-collar manufacturing workers have risen 4.1%, while blue-collar construction workers have seen a 5% increase since January 2025,” Bessent wrote on X (the former Twitter).
I ran his math against the BLS payroll data, and it holds up.
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Average weekly pay for rank-and-file manufacturing workers climbed from $1,161.99 in January 2025 to $1,266.43 in August 2026. Over that stretch, the consumer price index for urban wage earners (CPI-W), the inflation gauge built around hourly workers’ spending, rose about 4.7%.
Strip out inflation, and factory paychecks gained 4.1%. Construction workers did even better, landing almost exactly on five percent.
Here is how those two paychecks stack up against everyone else since January 2025, after inflation:
- Construction workers’ real weekly pay rose 5.0%.
- Manufacturing workers’ real weekly pay rose 4.1%.
- Real weekly pay for all private-sector rank-and-file workers rose 1.5%.
- Rank-and-file workers in service industries gained 0.9%.
- Source: BLS data
Every figure above is calculated from seasonally adjusted BLS earnings and CPI-W data. The two sectors Bessent picked grew roughly three times faster than the private-sector average.
Longer workweeks are driving blue-collar pay gains
This is where the numbers get less flattering. Weekly pay equals hourly pay multiplied by hours worked, and blue-collar workers have been putting in more hours.
Construction workers averaged 40.2 hours a week in August, up from 39.4 in January 2025, according to BLS data. By my calculation based on the agency’s hourly and weekly figures, factory workers added roughly one hour a week, too.
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Measured by the hour, the gains shrink. Real hourly pay rose about 1.6% for manufacturing workers and 2.9% for construction workers since January 2025.
In my analysis, that means more than half of the factory gain came from longer shifts rather than better pay rates. Extra hours are real money in your bank account, but they cost you evenings and weekends, and they are the first thing employers trim when orders slow.
There are cracks even inside Bessent’s favorite numbers. Manufacturing’s real weekly pay slipped about 0.3% from July to August, and the sector employs roughly 35,000 fewer workers than it did in January 2025, BLS data confirmed.
What Bessent’s wage claim means for your paycheck
Translated into August 2026 dollars, the typical factory worker takes home about $50 more a week than in January 2025, or roughly $2,600 a year. A construction worker is ahead by about $75 a week, close to $3,900 a year.
The typical rank-and-file worker across the whole private sector is ahead by about $16 a week. That works out to roughly $840 a year, a fraction of what Bessent’s two groups gained.
If you work in a store, a restaurant or an office, your year-over-year number is closer to flat. Real weekly pay for rank-and-file service workers is down about 0.2% from August 2025, based on my analysis of BLS data.
Bessent has used this playbook before. In June 2025, he pointed to nearly two percent real wage growth for blue-collar workers in the administration’s first five months.
“The only other time it has been this high … was during President Trump’s first term,” Bessent said, according to the White House.
Why the Fed rate hike could test blue-collar wage gains next
Construction and manufacturing are two of the most interest-rate-sensitive corners of the economy. Builders borrow to break ground, and factories borrow to buy equipment.
That borrowing just got pricier. The central bank lifted its benchmark rate to a range of 3.75% to 4% on Sept. 16. “Inflation remains elevated,” the Federal Reserve said in its statement.
Price pressure is not limited to the gas pump, either. Non-housing services inflation is “still running north of 3% on a twelve-month basis,” wrote Thomas Feltmate, director and senior economist at TD Economics.
If higher rates cool home building and factory orders, the extra hours that powered Bessent’s numbers are likely to shrink first. Hourly pay would then carry the load alone, and on that measure, blue-collar workers are only modestly ahead of inflation.
The August figures for manufacturing and construction pay are preliminary and could be revised in the next jobs report, due in early October. Watch real hourly earnings in that report, because hours can be cut far faster than pay rates.
If you are one of the workers Bessent cited, you have earned a real cushion. Put some of that extra-hours money toward savings now, while the extra shifts are still there.
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