First Quarter 2002 Wages and Employment (Discontinued) — 2002-10-16

The initiation of the quarterly release of preliminary employment and wage data derived from the Covered Employment and Wages (CEW) or ES-202 program was announced today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor. These data are derived from quarterly tax filings and include all businesses with employees covered by the various state Unemploy- ment Insurance (UI) programs, as well as federal employees covered by the Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees legislation. Until now, BLS has released annual average employment and wage data from the CEW program along with quarterly totals once per year, about 10 months after the end of each calendar year. The addition of quarterly publication responds to the demand for more timely data and reflects improvements in the accuracy of the preliminary data provided by the states.