Second Quarter — 1997-07-22

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 93.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $499 in the second quarter of 1997, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.3 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 second-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $428 a week, or 74.8 percent of the $572 median for men. The female-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (89.4 percent) and Hispanics (87.0 percent) than among whites (75.2 percent).