Labor month in review
The
August Review
Families see more unemployment
Highest earnings in Middle Atlantic
Real product per worker
It appears that a substantial fraction of the population do not obey the rear-rank cynic’s admonition, "Never volunteer." About 59 million working-age Americans did some volunteer work between September 2001 and September 2002, according to Stephanie Boraas’s analysis of a special supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS).
Boraas goes on to say that parents volunteer for their children, high school students are increasingly required by their schools to become involved in community service, and older persons, especially those in the early years of retirement, are more likely to do some volunteer work than younger people in the early years of their work careers.
Geoffrey D. Paulin keeps us up to date with the dynamics of the changing Hispanic market and their consumer expenditures. The Hispanic population, which should not in any case have been treated as homogeneous, has changed in composition in the 5 years since Paulin first examined their expenditure patterns in this Review. Since the mid-1990s, the share of the Hispanic population that is of Mexican origin has fallen from 62 percent to 56 percent, the share hailing from Puerto Rico has stayed at about 11 percent, and all other groups have increased. As Paulin summarizes, "… expenditure patterns continue to differ by geo-graphic origin, at the same time geo-graphic origin is changing within the Hispanic community."
John Turner, Leslie Muller, and Satyendra K. Verma examine different concepts of "participation" in defined-contribution pension plans, an increasingly important part of many workers’ retirement income. They suggest that "active pension benefit accrual deriving from current work" is an important element of identifying who is a participant in a retirement plan.
Families see more unemployment
In 2002, a total of 7.8 percent of the Nation’s families had an unemployed member, up from 6.6 percent the year before. This was the second consecutive increase in this proportion. Thus, in an average week in 2002, 5.8 million families had at least one member who was unemployed, an increase of 962,000 families from 2001.
The proportion of families with an unemployed member was higher for black families (13.1 percent) than for either white families (7.0 percent) or Hispanic families (11.2 percent). For all three groups, the proportion of families with an unemployed person was higher than in 2001.
As in 2001, the average annual unemployment rate for parents of children under 18 was lower for married persons (spouse present) than for persons of other marital status. In 2002, the jobless rate for married mothers with children under 18 was 4.1 percent. The unemployment rate for unmarried mothers—those who were single, widowed, divorced, or separated—was 9.5 percent.
The jobless rate for married fathers with children under 18 was 3.7 percent, while among unmarried fathers, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent. For all persons with children under 18 (women and men, any marital status) the average annual unemployment rate was 4.8 percent, up from 3.9 percent the previous year. More information on labor market status within families is available in news release USDL 03–369, "Employment Characteristics of Families in 2002."
Highest earnings in Middle Atlantic
The Middle Atlantic division ranked highest in average hourly earnings in July 2002. This division includes the States of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Workers in the Middle Atlantic States earned an average of $19.79 per hour. Workers in the Pacific States had the next highest earnings at $19.08 per hour, followed by the New England States ($18.61 per hour). The division with the lowest hourly earnings was East South Central, with mean earnings of $14.19 per hour. Mean hourly wages for workers—private industry and State and local government—in the country as a whole were $17.18 per hour. Learn more in National Compensation Survey: Occupational Wages in the United States, July 2002, (PDF 88K) BLS Summary 03–02.
In 2002, real GDP (in 1999 U.S. dollars) per employed person was $71,638 in the United States. In Belgium, the country with the next highest reading among 10 national economies, it was $64,099. Japan, at $51,636, and Korea, at $34,578, were at the lower end of the scale.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the most comprehensive measure of a country’s economic output, being the value of all market and some non-market goods and services produced within its territory. GDP per employed person can provide a general picture of a country’s overall productivity; this is only an approximate indicator of productivity, however, because using the number of persons employed as a measure of labor input ignores differences in the number of hours worked and in the skill levels of different people.
Each country’s GDP is converted to U.S. dollars through the use of purchasing power parities (PPPs). PPPs are somewhat analogous to price indexes in that they can be used to measure the cost of a particular basket of goods and services across countries at a particular point in time. For more information see "Comparative Real Gross Domestic Product per Capita and per Employed Person, Fourteen Countries, 1960–2002," in the Foreign Labor Statistics section of the BLS Web site.
Communications regarding the Monthly Labor Review may be sent to the Editor-in-Chief by e-mail to mlr@bls.gov, by mail at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Room 2850, Washington, DC, 20212, or by fax to (202) 691–7890.
Within Monthly Labor Review Online:
Welcome | Current
Issue | Index | Subscribe
| Archives
Exit Monthly Labor Review Online:
BLS Home | Publications & Research
Papers
