Locate data for the average weekly hours of production workers in manufacturing, available at www.bls.gov/lpc/lpcover. htm#Data. Select the historical time series link and then choose the Index data. Choose manufacturing as the sector and average weekly hours as the measure. Retrieve the report for the past five years. Use the options for a table format, non-HTML, and a space as a delimiter. This will give you both quarterly data and annual averages. When you copy the data into Excel you can use the Data, Text to Columns menu to put the data into a usable format. Create a graph of the data that shows the quarterly trend over the last five years.
