First Quarter — 1997-04-18

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 90.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $504 in the first quarter of 1997, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.1 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.0 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 explanatory note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $427 a week, or 73.4 percent of the $582 median for men. The female-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (87.3 percent) and Hispanics (85.6 percent).