Time Machine

Cutting and slicing operators

Name: Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders: employment and wages since 1956
Creator: Future History
License: https://futurehistory.earth/terms

Official title Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders (SOC 51-9032)

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 44,980 US cutting and slicing operators, with median pay of $46,570 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2003, the highest was 80,260, in May 2007. The earliest figure here is a Census count of 120,000 from 1960, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for cutting and slicing operators: CNC cutting centers, waterjet systems, and abrasive-jet cutting, 1980 to 2010. CNC cutting centers increased per-worker output substantially and began to consolidate work that previously required multiple machine operators into single integrated systems.

Official statistic: latest count and pay, highest count.Researched context: earliest figure.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to change -0.9% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

Official statistic

AI exposure studies

5.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023 Official statistic

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.

Last updated 31 October 2026.

Cite this page

APA

Future History. (2026, October 31). Cutting and slicing operators: jobs and pay since 1956 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-9032

Chicago

Future History. "Cutting and slicing operators: jobs and pay since 1956." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 31, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-9032.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_51_9032, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Cutting and slicing operators: jobs and pay since 1956}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/51-9032}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-31. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

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187519001925195019752000now

2026

Known then as Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders (BLS SOC 51-9032)

Known then as Cutting machine operator / paper cutter / machine hand (industry-specific titles, no unified category)

Known then as Machine operative, cutting and slicing (Census broad-group classification)

Known then as Cutting and Slicing Machine Operators and Tenders (DOT / Census era)

Known today as Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders (BLS SOC 51-9032)

Projected to still be called Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders (BLS SOC 51-9032)

Data from the May 2025 survey

US Employment

45K

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic

Report an error

Median Annual Wage

$46,570

Est.

≈ $45,376 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic

Report an error

Beat · 1855

The first purpose-built mechanical guillotine paper cutter is produced in Germany around 1855, building on earlier French designs. By the 1870s, American manufacturers including the Oswego Manufacturing Company and the Seybold Machine Company are producing powered guillotine cutters for the US printing and bookbinding industry. These machines establish the foundational design that remains in use today: a long flat base, a movable back gauge for setting cut width, a mechanical clamp to hold the paper stack, and a driven blade that descends in a single clean stroke.

Beat · 1898

On October 12, 1898, Wilhelmus Van Berkel opens his first factory in Rotterdam and begins manufacturing the world's first commercial flywheel meat slicer. His invention solves a problem every butcher and delicatessen owner has: slicing cold meats and cheeses by hand is slow, inconsistent, and tiring. Van Berkel's concave rotating blade, fed by a sliding meat table, produces a uniformly thin slice that no hand knife can reliably replicate. Within one year the company delivers 84 slicers. Van Berkel subsequently established factories in Europe, the United States, South America, and Canada, placing trained operators in butcher shops and delicatessens across the Atlantic.

Beat · 1928

July 7, 1928: the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri installs Otto Rohwedder's commercial bread-slicing machine and sells the world's first commercially pre-sliced loaves. Rohwedder had begun developing the concept around 1912, lost his prototype and blueprints to a fire in 1917, and rebuilt the machine over the following decade. The Chillicothe bakery's bread sales increase by 2,000 percent within two weeks. By 1929 Rohwedder's Mac-Roh Company is manufacturing bread slicers at full capacity; by 1930 Wonder Bread is selling pre-sliced nationally. The bread slicer is the technology that most rapidly expands employment of food-slicing machine operators, placing a trained machine hand in commercial bakeries across the country within a few years.

Beat · 1969

Boeing becomes the first company to commercially adopt CO2 laser cutting, using the technology on titanium, Hastelloy, and ceramic materials in aerospace production. The CO2 laser, invented by Kumar Patel at Bell Labs in 1963 and first industrially applied at Western Electric in 1965, will become the dominant precision cutting technology for glass, metal composites, and industrial materials through the 1980s. For cutting machine operators, the laser-cutting era means the operator's skill is increasingly in programming and setup, not in manually controlling the cut stroke.

Beat · 2000

The 2000 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) revision formally establishes 51-9032 as a distinct occupational code, separating "Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders" from textile cutting machine operators (51-6062) and hand cutters (51-9031). The 2000 SOC introduction coincides with the beginning of a long decline in manufacturing production-occupation employment: between 2000 and 2010, the US loses approximately 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, and most production-machine-operator categories decline with the sector. The BLS OEWS first reports 51-9032 separately in the 2003 survey estimates.

Beat · 2021

BLS OEWS May 2021 records 55,930 workers in SOC 51-9032, down from the pre-pandemic employment level and continuing a multi-decade decline from an estimated peak of over 100,000 in the postwar era. The industry distribution by this date shows paper manufacturing as the largest single sub-sector (approximately 21% of total), followed by food manufacturing, printing, glass, and stone fabrication. COVID-19 disrupted food-processing facilities disproportionately in 2020; the 2021 figure reflects partial recovery. Automated poultry and meat cutting systems accelerated their adoption during the pandemic period as a labor-shortage response.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures, ONS ASHE figures (UK pay and jobs) and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

How it began · 1855

The role of a person whose job is to operate a machine that cuts or slices a material to a precise dimension emerged in the 1850s from two converging industrializations: paper manufacturing and food processing. In the printing and bookbinding trades, the mechanized guillotine paper cutter arrived from Europe by mid-century. The first guillotine cutter was produced in Germany around 1855, a direct descendant of the precision cutting device whose design was pioneered in France in the 1840s. Guillaume Massiquot patented an early version in 1844; by the 1870s, Oswego Mfg. Co. and the Seybold Machine Co. in the United States were manufacturing powered paper-cutting guillotines for printers, binders, and box makers. The operator of one of these machines held a skilled position: loading reams of paper, setting the back gauge to a precise measurement, clamping the stack to hold it perfectly still, and bringing the blade down in a single even stroke. A misaligned cut could ruin an entire press run. In the same decades, the first mechanical meat and food slicers were entering commercial use. The Dutch inventor Wilhelmus van Berkel opened his first Rotterdam factory in 1898 and began exporting flywheel-driven meat slicers to butcher shops and delicatessens across Europe and North America. Bread slicing followed in 1928, when Otto Rohwedder's commercial slicer was installed at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, on July 7, 1928, producing the world's first commercially pre-sliced loaf. The machine required a trained operator to adjust blade spacing, tension, and feed rate. By the 1930s, the workers who ran these machines in bakeries, food plants, printing plants, cork factories, and rubber mills constituted a recognizable occupational family: people who understood their material, knew their machine, and were responsible for the uniformity and quality of every piece that came off the line.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace cutting and slicing operators? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say

Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
Target year 2035
-0.9%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 51-9032 (Cutting and slicing machine setters, operators, and tenders): 45.9 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 45.5 thousand in 2035, a change of -0.4 thousand (-0.9%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (0.6% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error

How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)

Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.

Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
5.7%
of tasks
What this measures
Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 51-9032.00 Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders. Shown: human-rated β = 0.057, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.114; GPT-4-rated β 0.068. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.
Official statisticReport an error

Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for cutting and slicing operators

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you here Set up, operate, or tend machines that cut or slice materials…

, such as glass, stone, cork, rubber, tobacco, food, paper, or insulating material.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Examine, measure, and weigh materials or products to verify…

conformance to specifications, using measuring devices, such as rulers, micrometers, or scales.^[2]

Where your edge is

AI is sitting alongside you here Press buttons, pull levers…

, or depress pedals to start and operate cutting and slicing machines.^[2]

Where your edge is

Tools of the era

How has the work of cutting and slicing operators changed since 1855?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

Mechanical guillotine cutter and flywheel meat slicer (hand-fed, operator-calibrated)
The mechanized guillotine paper cutter, emerging from German manufacturing in the 1850s and commercially produced in the United States by companies such as Oswego and Seybold by the 1870s, gave printing and bookbinding plants a precision cutting tool that replaced scissors and hand knives. The operator loaded paper stacks, set the back gauge by hand, clamped the stock, and pulled the blade handle. In food processing, the Van Berkel flywheel meat slicer (1898) performed the equivalent service: the operator placed the product against the concave circular blade, turned the flywheel handle, and achieved a uniformly thin slice that knife work could not reliably reproduce. Both machines required a trained operative whose skill lay in calibrating the machine to the material, not just in pulling the lever.
Effect on the work
These machines created the occupation rather than displacing it: hand-cutting paper to print-ready dimensions required multiple skilled workers per sheet; the powered guillotine let one operator process an entire ream in a single clamped stroke. Van Berkel's company grew from many slicers in 1899 to hundreds of machines annually within a decade, placing a trained operator in virtually every large butcher shop and delicatessen.
Electric power-feed guillotines and commercial bread slicers (Rohwedder 1928)
The 1920s brought electric motors to the guillotine cutter, replacing the hand crank and foot treadle with a powered stroke that could process far larger paper stacks at consistent force. The most culturally consequential development came on July 7, 1928, when Otto Rohwedder's commercial bread-slicing machine produced the world's first commercially pre-sliced loaf at the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri. The machine used a row of closely spaced blades driven by a motor, advancing the loaf at a calibrated feed rate. Sales at the Chillicothe bakery jumped by 2,000 percent within two weeks. By 1930, Wonder Bread was selling pre-sliced nationally, and Rohwedder's Mac-Roh Company was producing machines as fast as it could. Every commercial bakery installing a bread slicer needed an operator to set the blade spacing, adjust the feed rate, and clean and maintain the machine.
Effect on the work
The commercial bread slicer is the single technology that most rapidly expanded machine-operative employment in the cutting and slicing occupational family. Between 1928 and 1940, bread slicers moved from novelty to universal bakery fixture, placing trained machine operators in thousands of commercial bakeries. Food-slicing machine employment grew substantially through the 1930s and 1940s as packaged meats, cheeses, and baked goods expanded in American supermarkets.
Programmable back-gauge and hydraulic clamp (semi-automatic cutting era)
Starting in the 1960s, programmable back-gauge systems replaced manual crank settings with dial or punch-card control, allowing an operator to pre-program a sequence of cut dimensions and execute them with fewer resetting steps. Hydraulic clamping replaced mechanical hold-down bars, improving stack control and cut quality on larger-format paper. In food processing, advances in blade metallurgy and motor controls allowed higher-speed slicers with adjustable slice thickness. These machines did not eliminate the operator role; they shifted it from raw manual adjustment to setup programming and quality monitoring. A skilled cutter in a commercial printing plant of the 1970s might program many cut sequences for a single print job, then monitor the output for blade drift and paper alignment.
Effect on the work
Semi-automatic programmable cutters roughly doubled the throughput per operator without significantly reducing headcount in the 1970s and 1980s, as paper and printing volumes grew rapidly with the offset lithography boom. The net effect was a stabilization of employment rather than growth: more output per worker, but sustained demand for the occupation through the peak of the commercial printing industry in the mid-1990s.
CNC cutting centers, waterjet systems, and abrasive-jet cutting (multi-axis precision era)
Computer Numerical Control (CNC) technology transformed cutting operations across glass, stone, metal, and industrial materials from the 1980s onward. Waterjet cutting, whose commercial lineage for paper-industry applications dates to a 1933 Wisconsin paper company application, matured into precision industrial equipment through Bendix Corporation's 1970s development and Mohamed Hashish's abrasive waterjet nozzle work at Flow International in the 1980s. CO2 laser cutting, first demonstrated industrially by Boeing in 1969, became widely adopted in metals and composites fabrication through the 1980s and 1990s. For the cutting and slicing machine operator, CNC integration meant a fundamental shift: the new job was programming and setup, not just machine operation. A CNC waterjet or laser-cutting operator loaded a DXF drawing file, defined cut parameters, set up the material blank, and monitored the automatic execution. This required more technical training than the prior generation of manual machines but also offered more control and repeatability.
Effect on the work
CNC cutting centers increased per-worker output substantially and began to consolidate work that previously required multiple machine operators into single integrated systems. The BLS documented a broad decline in manufacturing production occupations after 2000: employment of production occupations in manufacturing fell by more than a million jobs (a decrease) between 2007 and 2020. Cutting and slicing machine operators in paper, glass, and industrial materials segments were among those affected.
Robotic vision-guided cutting systems and AI-integrated quality control (current era)
From the 2010s onward, the leading edge of cutting and slicing automation shifted from CNC-programmable to vision-guided robotic systems. In meat and poultry processing, computer-vision systems using X-ray and near-infrared scanning now identify bone locations and natural seams in carcasses, allowing automated trimming heads to follow individual anatomical variation rather than a fixed cut path. This technology addresses the core challenge that kept meat-cutting partially manual for over a century: every animal is slightly different. By 2025, primary cutting, sorting, and packing in large poultry processing facilities were primarily executed by automated systems. In paper and printing, digital finishing machines connected to workflow management systems now execute cut-and-crease programs direct from design files, reducing manual setup. The surviving operator role concentrates on machine changeover, quality sampling, jam clearing, material loading, and the judgment calls that arise when a material behaves unexpectedly, such as a paper reel with inconsistent caliper or a frozen product that resists the slicer blade.

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Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders employment and pay by year

On record since1855

Latest US employment44,980 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Latest US median pay$46,570 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error

Outlook-0.9% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error

View all 26 years of cited US data, each linked to its source

Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders in the US: employment and pay by year, with sources
Year	US employment	Annual pay (median unless marked)	Source	Report
1956	n/a	$3,900 (average)	Est., University of Missouri Libraries [4] Researched context	Report
1960	120,000	n/a	Decennial Census 1960 [1] Researched context	Report
1997	71,000	$23,660 (average)	BLS CPS 1997 [2] Researched context	Report
2003	70,960	$26,060	BLS OEWS May 2003 [3] Official statistic	Report
2004	73,250	$26,670	BLS OEWS May 2004 [3] Official statistic	Report
2005	78,030	$27,570	BLS OEWS May 2005 [3] Official statistic	Report
2006	77,960	$27,930	BLS OEWS May 2006 [3] Official statistic	Report
2007	80,260	$28,500	BLS OEWS May 2007 [3] Official statistic	Report
2008	76,500	$28,800	BLS OEWS May 2008 [3] Official statistic	Report
2009	70,700	$29,600	BLS OEWS May 2009 [3] Official statistic	Report
2010	61,360	$30,000	BLS OEWS May 2010 [3] Official statistic	Report
2011	59,430	$30,820	BLS OEWS May 2011 [3] Official statistic	Report
2012	56,560	$31,430	BLS OEWS May 2012 [3] Official statistic	Report
2013	59,450	$31,810	BLS OEWS May 2013 [3] Official statistic	Report
2014	62,570	$32,040	BLS OEWS May 2014 [3] Official statistic	Report
2015	63,330	$32,190	BLS OEWS May 2015 [3] Official statistic	Report
2016	61,330	$32,870	BLS OEWS May 2016 [3] Official statistic	Report
2017	60,460	$33,610	BLS OEWS May 2017 [3] Official statistic	Report
2018	60,840	$34,620	BLS OEWS May 2018 [3] Official statistic	Report
2019	57,960	$35,600	BLS OEWS May 2019 [3] Official statistic	Report
2020	52,760	$36,980	BLS OEWS May 2020 [3] Official statistic	Report
2021	55,930	$37,810	BLS OEWS May 2021 [3] Official statistic	Report
2022	54,110	$39,880	BLS OEWS May 2022 [3] Official statistic	Report
2023	52,720	$44,310	BLS OEWS May 2023 [3] Official statistic	Report
2024	47,540	$45,700	BLS OEWS May 2024 [3] Official statistic	Report
2025	44,980	$46,570	BLS OEWS May 2025 [3] Official statistic	Report

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See all roles in Manufacturing

Mechanical guillotine cutter and flywheel meat slicer (hand-fed, operator-calibrated) (1855 to 1920)

Electric power-feed guillotines and commercial bread slicers (Rohwedder 1928) (1920 to 1960)

Programmable back-gauge and hydraulic clamp (semi-automatic cutting era) (1960 to 1990)

CNC cutting centers, waterjet systems, and abrasive-jet cutting (multi-axis precision era) (1980 to 2010)

Robotic vision-guided cutting systems and AI-integrated quality control (current era) (2010 to present)

Cutting and Slicing Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders employment and pay by year

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