Fourth Quarter — 2000-01-20

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 98.2 million full-time wage and salary workers were $568 in the fourth quarter of 1999, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 5.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.6 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 $483 a week, or 76.3 percent of the $633 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (82.3 percent) and Hispanics (85.0 percent) than among whites (75.5 percent).