Third Quarter — 2000-10-19

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 101.5 million full-time wage and salary workers were $575 in the third quarter of 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 5.3 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.5 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 (CPS), 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 third-quarter data are: --Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $491 per week, or 76.7 percent of the $640 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among Hispanics (90.6 percent) and blacks (88.2 percent) than among whites (74.8 percent).