First Quarter — 1996-04-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 88.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $489 in the first quarter of 1996, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.3 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual earnings are collected as part of the Current Population Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which respondents are asked, among other things, how much each wage and salary worker usually earns. (See explanatory note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $419 a week, or 75.2 percent of the $557 median for men. The female-male earnings' ratios were much higher among blacks (89.2 percent) and Hispanics (91.6 percent) than among whites (73.6 percent).