Overtime Choice of Manufacturers

According to John Brandt, CEO of the MPI Group, the manufacturing workweek continues to grow and the most recent report shows manufacturing overtime for all employees was 3.3 hours for the fifth consecutive month (4.3 hours for production employees).

“That doesn’t look like a one-time surge to meet unexpected demand,” Brandt wrote in his blog. “Instead, it seems like a consistent strategy of using overtime hours rather than hiring. The U.S. has nearly 12 million manufacturing employees. Imagine if even half of those overtime hours were applied to creating new full-time positions, instead of just additional hours for current employees. Simple math says that nearly 500,000 new jobs could appear. Even with current employees losing overtime wages, it’s hard to envision a scenario in which a half-million new jobs wouldn’t boost the economy into overdrive.”