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June  2003, Vol. 126, No.6

Recent changes in the national Current Employment Statistics survey

Teresa L. Morisi

T he Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey for the national series underwent a number of important changes with the release of May 2003 preliminary data on June 6 of that year. First and foremost, the CES survey converted to the 2002 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) from the 1987 Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC). With the release of national data in June 2003, all CES data—both the current and the historical series—are now based on NAICS.

The CES survey also completed the transition to a probability-based sample design from a quota-based sample design. Yet another change to the national series was the introduction of concurrent seasonal adjustment, in which seasonal factors are calculated each month to produce seasonally adjusted data series.

This article covers changes as they occurred in the national CES series. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a separate CES State and Area program that provides employment, hours, and earnings statistics for States and metropolitan areas.¹ The State and Area program converted to NAICS with the release of preliminary January 2003 data in March 2003.²

This excerpt is from an article published in the June 2003 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes
1 Data users should keep in mind that the national estimates are independently derived and that the State and Area estimates are derived individually by each State. Thus, the sum of the States’ employment totals does not, in general, add up to the national total; in other words, neither of the two totals is forced to equal the other.

2 See Molly E. Barth, "Recent changes in the State and Area Current Employment Statistics survey," this issue, pp. 14–19.

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