Third Quarter — 2001-10-24

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.9 million full-time wage and salary workers were $595 in the third quarter of 2001, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.7 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 third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $507 per week, or 75.2 percent of the $674 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (88.6 percent) and Hispanics (85.1 percent) than among whites (74.2 percent).