Fourth Quarter — 1997-01-24

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 91.3 million full-time wage and salary workers were $499 in the fourth quarter of 1996, an increase of 3.1 percent from a year earlier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Over the same period, prices also rose 3.1 percent as measured by the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U). 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 fourth-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $425 per week, 75.2 percent of the $565 median for men. The female-male earnings ratios for blacks (87.7 percent) and for workers of Hispanic origin (86.8 percent) were higher than for whites (74.7 percent).