OBT Magazine

Here's a bit of a good news-bad news chart.

The rate of job cuts for production workers in manufacturing has slowed dramatically in the past few months, as companies start to rebuild inventories.

However, they are still aggressively slicing their nonproduction workers--engineers, managers, sales staff, and the like. Over the last three months, employment of manufacturing nonprod workers is falling at a 7.6% annual pace, compared to a 4.2% pace for production workers.