Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2002-04-17

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 97.2 million full-time wage and salary workers were $614 in the first quarter of 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.7 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.3 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 the explanatory note.) Highlights from the first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $535 per week, or 77.8 percent of the $688 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (91.8 percent) and Hispanics (85.1 percent) than among whites (77.5 percent).