Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2004-01-16

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $625 in the fourth quarter of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 2.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.9 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 fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $561 per week, or 79.7 percent of the $704 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (89.6 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (87.6 percent) than among whites (79.1 percent) or Asians (73.9 percent).