Among the industries that manufacture physical goods, labor productivity has increased steadily over the years. In many manufacturing industries, production tasks that once took two weeks and a dozen workers to finish now require only a few hours to complete. Since the 1950s, therefore, labor productivity has grown nearly three times faster than the rate of growth of productivity in the rest of the economy. Annual U.S. manufacturing output is five times higher than in the 1950s, even though total employment in manufacturing—about 16 million—is the same as today. U.S. employment has more than doubled since the 1950s, so what happened to the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing jobs?