Second Quarter — 1998-07-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 95.5 million full-time wage and salary workers were $515 in the second quarter of 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.2 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.6 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. For further information, see the explanatory note. --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $446 a week, or 75.6 percent of the $590 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (82.8 percent) and Hispanics (87.4 percent) than among whites (75.6 percent).