Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2008-01-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 108.3 million full-time wage and salary workers were $700 in the fourth quarter of 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.6 percent higher than a year earlier compared with a gain of 4.0 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual weekly 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 Technical Note.) Highlights from the fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $618 per week, or 79.8 percent of the $774 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (92.1 percent) and blacks (90.0 percent) than among whites (79.0 percent) or Asians (75.6 percent).