Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2003-01-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 97.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $615 in the fourth quarter of 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.7 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 fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $543 per week, or 78.5 percent of the $692 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratio was higher among blacks (90.0 percent) and Hispanics (88.7 percent) than among whites (78.8 percent).