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Chapter 2.
Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Establishment
Survey
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) cooperates with
State Employment Security Agencies in the Current
Employment Statistics (CES) survey to collect data each
month on employment, hours, and earnings from a sample of
nonagricultural establishments (including government). In
2003, the CES sample included about 160,000 businesses and
government agencies, which represent approximately 400,000
individual worksites. The active CES sample covers
approximately one-third of all nonfarm payroll workers.
From these data, a large number of employment, hours, and
earnings series are prepared and published each month in
considerable industry and geographic detail. The employment
data include series on all employees, women workers, and
production or nonsupervisory workers. For the production
or nonsupervisory workers in private industries, hours and
earnings data include series on average hourly and weekly
earnings, average weekly hours, and, for manufacturing
industries, average weekly overtime hours. For most series,
seasonally adjusted data also are published.
Background
The first monthly studies of employment and payrolls by
BLS began in 1915 and covered four manufacturing industries.
Before 1915, the principal sources of employment data in the
United States were the census surveys—the decennial Census
of Population and the quinquennial Census of Manufactures.
No regular employment data were compiled between the censuses.
In 1916, the BLS survey was expanded to cover employment
and payrolls in 13 manufacturing industries; by 1923, the
number of industries had increased to 52, and, by 1932, 91
manufacturing and 15 nonmanufacturing industries were
covered by a monthly employment survey.
With the deepening economic crisis in 1930, President
Herbert C. Hoover appointed an Advisory Committee on
Employment Statistics, which recommended extension of
the BLS program to include the development of hours and
earnings series. In 1932, the U.S. Congress granted an
increase in the BLS appropriation for the survey. In 1933,
average hourly earnings and average weekly hours were
published for the first time for total manufacturing, for 90
manufacturing industries, and for 14 nonmanufacturing
categories.
During the Great Depression, there was controversy
concerning the actual number of unemployed people; no
reliable measures of employment or unemployment existed.
This confusion stimulated efforts to develop comprehensive
estimates of total wage and salary employment in nonfarm
industries, and BLS survey data produced such a figure for
the first time in 1936.
Interest in employment statistics for States and areas
also grew. Even before BLS entered the field in 1915,
three States—Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey—were
preparing employment statistics. In 1915, New York and
Wisconsin entered into cooperative agreements with BLS,
whereby sample data collected from employers by a State
agency would be used jointly with BLS to prepare State and
national series. By 1928, five additional States had entered
into such compacts, and another five joined the program
by 1936. By 1940, estimates of total nonfarm employment
for all 48 States and the District of Columbia were
available. Since 1949, the CES program has been a
fully integrated Federal-State project that provides
employment, hours, and earnings information by industry on
a national, State, and area basis. Cooperative arrangements
were in effect with all 50 States, the District of Columbia,
Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands by 1980.
In the early 1990s, the CES program began a transition
to automated data collection methods. By 1996, it had
completed implementation of computer-assisted reporting
through telephone interviews and touch-tone self-reporting,
and introduced electronic data interchange. Beginning in
1996, improvements to seasonal adjustment techniques were
introduced to better control for various calendar and
weather effects.
The CES program completed a conversion from its original
quota sample design to a probability-based sample survey
design and switched from the Standard Industrial
Classification system to the North American Industry
Classification System in 2003. The industry-coding update
included reconstruction of historical estimates in order
to preserve time series for data users. Also in 2003, the
CES program began concurrent seasonal adjustment, a process
that makes use of all available monthly estimates, including
those for the latest month.
Next: Concepts
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Bureau of Labor Statistics
