This paper makes an attempt to assess the adequacy and representativeness of Bangladesh’s only published official time series data on money daily wage rates in industry with a view to interpreting the experience of her large-scale industry about the movement of real wage levels prevailing in the quinquennium 1972/3-1976/7. The desire to interpret this experience is premised on both its analytical and historical relevance to a proper inventory of facts. We argue that the above noted data, generated by the Bureau of Statistics (BBS), while it purports to estimate average wage rates in five industries, must be adjudged to be poor estimates, largely because, by improperly aggregating establishments of varying size, and covering respondents with potentially differing personal and occupational characteristics from one year to the next, the underlying sample involves a degree of misplaced aggregation. A perhaps more important conclusion we reach is that, while a knowledge of the experience of Bangladesh’s large scale industry during the quinquennium 1973-1977 is of a certain historical and analytical Interest, the BBS industrial wage data has to be adjudged an inaccurate guide with regard to the most important segment, from the point of view of that particular experience, of Bangladesh’s large scale industry, viz, the nationalized industry. Empirically, we show, that BBS data show no reflection of the very considerable increases achieved by public-sector workers in 1973/4, that since 1973/4, proportionate annual increments underlying BBS data have mostly been higher than, and extraordinarily more variable than, the matched increments for large industries, and finally that real wage levels derived from BBS data understated, despite higher annual increments, the matched levels in the nationalized industries by between 10% to 17%, depending on the industry type, between 1972/3 and 1976/7.