Labor month in review
The
May Review
Productivity
edges up in the early 90s
Pay
comparisons published
Weekly
earnings rise in 1997
This issue of the Review is unique in having an article that falls under the umbrella of each of the three largest statistical activities in the Bureau of Labor Statistics—employment, wages, and prices. Marianne A. Ferber and Jane Waldfogel write that having a period of nontraditional work in one’s record leads, on average, to a slight reduction of current wages. The impact is most visible among women and workers whose nontraditional arrangement was involuntary.
George R. Gray, Donald W. Myers, and Phyllis S. Myers mined and quarried their way through the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ collective bargaining agreements file to catalog and analyze provisions concerning worker safety in more than 700 major contracts. Some of the more frequent subjects to appear include general union-management cooperation clauses, formal labor-management safety committees at the local level, mandates for protective clothing, and establishing safety councils at the national level.
Todd Wilson describes the slowdown in the rate of price increase as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) during 1997. The change in the price of energy swung from a sizeable increase in 1996 to a 3.4-percent decline in 1997. Price increases for food moderated to a 1.5-percent rate, the lowest since 1992. Price increases for all items other than food and energy, a measure often referred to as the "core" CPI, edged down to a rate of 2.2 percent in 1997, the smallest increase in 32 years.
Productivity edges up in the early 90s
The rate of increase in output per hour in the private nonfarm business sector edged up to a compounded annual average rate of 1.1 percent for the years 1990–96. Over the period 1979–90, the rate of increase was 1 percent per year. While the overall change was relatively modest, there have been more visible changes over the long term in the components of labor productivity.
Throughout four intermediate periods—1948–73, 1973–79, 1979–90, and 1990–96—the contribution of capital intensity has stayed very close to its long-term average of 0.7 percent per year. The contribution of labor composition was nearly negligible in 1948–73 and zero in 1973–79 before rising to 0.3 and 0.4 percent per year in the 80s and 90s, respectively. Multifactor productivity, the output per unit of combined capital and labor inputs, rose at a brisk 1.9 percent per year from 1948 to 1973 before collapsing to 0.4 percent in 1973–79. In 1979–90, the average annual multifactor productivity increase bottomed out at nil before edging up to contribute 0.2 percent per year in the early 1990s.
A comprehensive new bulletin, Occupational Compensation Survey: National Summary, 1996 (BLS Bulletin 2497), and its abridged version, Occupational Pay and Interarea Comparisons, United States, 1996 (Summary 98–2), present estimates and analysis of interarea pay comparisons for occupational groups in both private industry and State and local government.
For blue-collar work, pay rates tended to be similar in private industry and governments in 1996. In occupations in which there were statistically significant differences, pay for general maintenance workers, level I guards, janitors, and light truckdrivers was higher in State and local government. Pay was higher in private industry for level II maintenance electronics technicians.
For white-collar jobs, private industry often paid professional and administrative workers higher salaries than did State and local governments. In contrast, higher pay for some technical and clerical positions existed in the private sector.
In the contiguous United States, the highest pay relatives (to the average pay level across all industries for an occupational group) occurred in San Francisco for professional, administrative, technical, clerical, and maintenance workers. The highest pay relatives for protective service and janitorial workers were found in Nassau-Suffolk [Counties], New York. By our quick-and-dirty analysis of the mean absolute differential from pay relatives of 100 across several occupational groups, the area that was most like the United States was Columbus, Ohio.
Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers rose to $511 in the fourth quarter of 1997 from $499 a year earlier. This was a 2.4-percent increase over the year, compared with a gain of 1.9 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.
Women who worked full time had median earnings of $440 per week, compared with the $587 median for men. Female-male earnings ratios were higher for black (81.2 percent) and Hispanic (84.5 percent) workers than they were for white employees (75.4 percent). However, the overall median earnings for Hispanics ($354) and blacks ($410) were lower than the $528 median for whites.
Full-time workers aged 25 and older with less than a high school diploma had median weekly earnings of $324, compared with $465 for high school graduates with no college, $547 for workers with some college or an associate degree, and $789 for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
On an annual average basis, earnings rose from $490 (current dollars) in 1996 to $503 in 1997. After adjustment for inflation as measured by the CPI-U, the gain was a more modest 0.3 percent to $303 (1982 dollars).
For more information, see news release USDL 98-18, Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers: Fourth Quarter 1997.
Within Monthly Labor Review Online:
Welcome | Current
Issue | Index | Subscribe | Archives
Exit Monthly Labor Review Online:
BLS Home | Publications
& Research Papers
