Usual Weekly Earnings Of Wage And Salary Workers: — 2005-01-26

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 101.6 million full-time wage and salary workers were $647 in the fourth quarter of 2004, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 3.5 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.3 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 fourth-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $578 per week, or 80.1 percent of the $722 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (96.8 percent) and Hispanics or Latinos (84.7 percent) than among whites (78.8 percent) or Asians (74.5 percent).