First Quarter — 1999-04-15

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 95.6 million full-time wage and salary workers were $538 in the first quarter of 1999, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.3 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.7 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 first quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $468 a week, or 76.5 percent of the $612 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios for blacks (84.5 percent) and for Hispanics (85.5 percent) were higher than the ratio for whites (75.8 percent).