“Reviving the blue-collar boom that Americans experienced during the first Trump term has been a day one priority for the administration,” the White House told Newsweek, while citing improvements to real wages and manufacturing output in 2025.

The latest Labor Department data puts the issue of employment into sharp relief. September’s delayed jobs report showed an encouraging uptick in overall hiring but no pause in blue-collar employment’s long-term decline.

Of the five industry groups or “supersectors” that could be broadly considered “blue collar”—manufacturing, mining and logging, transportation and warehousing, utilities, and construction—only the latter saw an increase in September. Construction’s 19,000-job gain was also insufficient to offset the monthly loss of 25,300 jobs in transportation or manufacturing shedding a further 6,000.