Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2003-07-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $616 in the second quarter of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.8 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.2 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 the Explanatory Note.) Highlights from the second-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $547 per week, or 79.0 percent of the $692 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (90.6 percent) and Hispanics (87.5 percent) than among whites (78.8 percent) or Asians (79.8 percent).