Jaime Multhauf works on an 86-foot-long, 99,000-pound dipper shovel handle at Weldall Manufacturing Inc. in Waukesha. Weldall is among the manufacturers that have added jobs. As a whole, manufacturing in Wisconsin gained 11,472 jobs last year. Credit: Mark Hoffman

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This sounds good: The 23,000-odd jobs Wisconsin added last year, on balance, were heavily concentrated in high-wage industries.

And not so good: From December 2010 to December 2011, the average weekly wage in Wisconsin declined.

Both seemingly - but not really - contradictory facts are buried in a mountain of employment data the state Department of Workforce Development published Friday. It's data that ultimately will become part of what the federal government calls the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

It's also data that's the subject of bitter debate between Wisconsin's rival political factions as the state bumps along toward a gubernatorial recall election on Tuesday.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker says these are the numbers - presumably excluding the wage decline - that truly show Wisconsin's improving economic picture. Rival candidate Tom Barrett, Milwaukee's mayor and a Democrat, says Walker's administration has inappropriately released the data prematurely, before the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has fully vetted it. Barrett says the true picture of Wisconsin's economy comes from another data set, a monthly employment survey that shows year-over-year job losses here.

Walker wields the more-precise measuring stick. The quarterly census covers more than 95% of employers in Wisconsin; the monthly survey polls less than 5% and has a wide margin of error.

But even given that the governor's numbers are more solid, the gain of 23,608 jobs is modest. Through the first nine months of last year, Wisconsin's job growth lagged the country as a whole in percentage terms, and also lagged every other state in the industrial Upper Midwest.

And whatever forward motion on jobs has occurred under Walker, it actually falls short of employment growth during the last year of Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration.

The Workforce Development data site shows that during 2010, Doyle's final year, Wisconsin added 32,713 jobs. Almost all were in the private sector. In fact, Wisconsin added more private-sector jobs in Doyle's last year than it did in Walker's first.

For Walker, the big positive beyond the presumed job growth itself is where those jobs were added.

Just because someone gets hired in a high-wage industry doesn't mean that person will be highly paid. But it would be discouraging for Walker if the bulk of the new jobs were in low-wage sectors such as food service, residential care or social assistance.

They weren't. All of those industries shed jobs, as did most of the lowest-paying sectors. The great majority of the job gains were in industries with average wages significantly higher than those statewide.

Machinery manufacturing (average weekly wage: $1,162) added nearly 3,800 jobs. Fabricated metal manufacturing ($955) added more than 4,500. There were nearly 1,300 new jobs at professional and technical services firms ($1,347), and more than 4,200 in the category that includes doctors' offices and medical laboratories.

Manufacturing as a whole gained 11,472 jobs, and that figures importantly in the pattern of job growth in industries with relatively high average pay.

"I am not surprised that employment rose in higher wage sectors because of the recovery of manufacturing," Richard Freeman, a Harvard University economics professor who reviewed the Wisconsin data, said via email.

Both he and University of Utah economics professor Thomas Maloney dispelled the seeming contradiction of a declining average pay statewide - the weekly average dropped from $835 to $817 - amid growth in high-wage industries.

While those sectors hired, average pay within them fell, as it did in most other sectors with the greatest job growth, the economists noted.

"Industries that added more bodies also experienced modest wage reductions," Maloney said in an email.

That could reflect lower pay of new hires, Freeman said.

"But it is not normal to see such a strong pattern," he added.

The average wage declined in two-thirds of the industries analyzed.

A fourth-quarter wage drop is somewhat unusual but not unprecedented. It has happened one other time in the last 10 years - a $6 decline in 2005.

The analysis of the state data looked at employment and the average weekly wage in 93 different industries, from accommodations to wood product manufacturing.

About half the industries gained jobs, and about half lost them. Gainers and losers appeared at all wage levels, but the net gains skewed sharply toward industries with relatively high average pay.

The third of the industries with the highest average pay at the beginning of the period - from $1,024 a week at nondurable goods wholesalers to $2,369 a week at financial investment firms - added a net 24,356 jobs.

The third with the lowest average pay - ranging from $184 to $635 a week - added 1,474.

The middle third, meanwhile, saw a net loss of 2,217 jobs.

Add the three numbers and the net gain for the 93 industries comes to 23,613 jobs. The number differs very slightly from the overall state gain because detailed data isn't available for eight industries with Wisconsin employment counts so low that they aren't published. Those industries - among them are space research and technology and oil and gas extraction - together account for well under 1% of all state jobs.

All manner of questions have been raised about the jobs numbers advanced by both Walker and Barrett as the politicians vie for advantage, and the data the state published on Friday contains at least one eyebrow-raising line:

The biggest employment gain by far - 7,002 jobs - came in the "Unclassified" sector. That catchall category also saw a whopping 36% drop in its average wage.

"Very peculiar," Freeman said. " . . . It makes no sense that wages fell by one-third."