If you make people redundant and those who remain take a pay cut, it is possible for the mean wage to rise. The median gives a clearer picture of the changes.

Eval: students got the point very quickly (a touch of the paulo freires). The feeling was that it would have been better to have different wages rather than the same figure each time, so I'll modify this handout. That modification would also increase the usefulness as a revision aid for mean and median. The percentage change calculation caused some searching in notes as well.