First Quarter — 2001-04-18

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 99.1 million full-time wage and salary workers were $592 in the first quarter of 2001, 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 first-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $508 per week, or 76.0 percent of the $668 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (88.9 percent) and blacks (87.1 percent) than among whites (74.8 percent).