Third Quarter — 1997-10-22

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 95.8 million full-time wage and salary workers were $499 in the third quarter of 1997, 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 2.1 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 third-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $429 a week, or 74.9 percent of the $573 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (89.5 percent) and Hispanics (85.5 percent) than among whites (74.5 percent).