Real manufacturing wages in the U.S. have grown at 0.72% annually over the past 10 years through July 2002.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRMS

That graph is awful. I'm not even sure that your conclusion is a valid one. Whoever made that graph should be beaten to death with the collected works of Edward Tufte.

What's bad about it? It has a fairly low "information density" (because it's a boring time series) but there's no other real sins I can think of. It's the authors of pretty (but useless) infographics who generally need to be beaten to death with the collected works of Edward Tufte.

The data show <2% growth per year but the axes make it look rather dramatic.

That doesn't make it a bad graph. In fact, putting lots of white space at the top and bottom to make 2% look small would make it a bad (misleading) graph and obfuscate any detail in the line. It's a graph representative of the data. Could have done with a better colourscheme, perhpas.

Which would put it at about inflation, so no growth.

real wages... meaning adjusted for inflation.

Which inflation number? The government one where anything that has gone up is removed or some other made up random number we like to call 'inflation?' :)

I measure inflation using the price of startup-friendly ramen, which has tripled over the last decade.