Fourth Quarter — 2001-01-18

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.8 million full- time wage and salary workers were $585 in the fourth quarter of 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.0 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.4 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 $502 a week, or 76.3 percent of the $658 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (89.4 percent) and blacks (88.2 percent) than among whites (75.4 percent).