Second Quarter — 2001-07-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $595 in the second quarter of 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 5.1 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.4 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 $514 per week, or 77.1 percent of the $667 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (86.1 percent) and blacks (85.7 percent) than among whites (76.0 percent).