As the labor market continues to struggle, one surprising bright spot stands out amid the list of battered industries — factory jobs, CNNMoney.com reported.

Manufacturing employment began its decline long before the recession, losing jobs every year since 1998. But since the start of this year, there has been a 1.6 percent gain in manufacturing jobs, about twice the pace of growth in other private-sector jobs.

Even if manufacturing hiring stays flat the rest of this year, the industry is poised to post its biggest percentage gain in jobs since 1994.

“In 2008 and 2009, manufacturers would not hire,” said Norbert Ore, head of the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) survey of manufacturers. “Today they’re willing to fill openings, willing to hire. Here and there, they’re adding a shift.”

The ISM index for manufacturing employment stands at a 35-year high.

About 26 percent of manufacturing companies surveyed by ISM reported adding staff, compared with 5 percent that are cutting workers. In the service sector, 13 percent said they are adding workers and 18 percent said they are still cutting jobs.

Job placement firms say they’re seeing more business from manufacturers as they ramp up production.

The unemployment rate for manufacturing workers has also shown much greater improvement than for workers overall, dropping to 9.5 percent in August from 13 percent in December. That compares with a far more modest improvement to 9.6 percent from 10 percent for the overall labor force.

“There was an idea out there that all the manufacturing jobs lost during the recession were gone and never coming back. That’s not true,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist for the Economic Policy Institute. “Once people started buying stuff again, some of them had to come back.”

But manufacturing employment, like most sectors, still has a long way to go to fully recover from the job losses caused by the recession, Shierholz said.