Notes

¹  The 2007 annual average of monthly estimates was 231,867.

²  Hires include re-hires of laid off employees and transfers of employees to other establishments operated by the same employer.

³  Based on December 2007 estimates from the BLS National Compensation Survey’s Employer Cost of Employee Compensation (ECEC) reports.  Occupations in the graph are ranked according to December 2007 hourly compensation.  ECEC data cover civilian workers employed by the private sector, state governments, and local governments. 

⁴  Based on annual average of monthly employment levels for each occupational group estimated from the Current Population Survey (CPS).  The CPS data cover all workers, including public and private wage and salary workers and the self-employed.

⁵  Capital is defined as the services derived from the stock of physical assets and software.  The assets included are fixed business equipment and computer software, structures, inventories, and land.  Structures include nonresidential structures and residential capital that is rented out by profit-making firms or persons.

⁶  Labor compensation is defined as wages and salaries of employees plus employers’ contributions for social insurance and private benefit plans.  The value of all other fringe benefits also is included.  Additionally, BLS estimates the wages, salaries, and supplemental payments of the self-employed.

⁷  Capital compensation is defined as the sum of the portion of noncorporate income not attributed to labor, corporate profits, net interest, rental income, adjusted capital consumption allowance, inventory valuation adjustments, the portions of indirect taxes assumed to be associated with capital (notably motor vehicle and property taxes), and the sum of business transfers and government subsidies.

⁸  These earnings data relate to production workers in natural resources and mining, production workers in manufacturing, construction workers in construction, and nonsupervisory workers in the service-providing industries.  On average these workers account for about 82 percent of private nonfarm jobs.

⁹  Workers’ educational attainment and occupational choices, in addition to their industry choices, influence their wages.  BLS has defined a set of six educational attainment clusters by detailed occupation that provide “a natural hierarchical sorting of occupations that reflects increasing levels of skill, education, and training.  Occupations are grouped on the basis of the percentage of workers who have a high school diploma or less, some college or an associate degree, or a college diploma (bachelor’s degree or higher).  The system defines six education clusters:  high school occupations (HS), high school or some college occupations (HS/SC), some college occupations (SC), high school or some college or college (HS/SC/C), some college or college (SC/C), and college (C).  Because only two occupations fell into the some college cluster, it was excluded from this analysis.  For more information on the educational attainment clusters, see Chapter 1 of Occupational Projections and Training Data, 2008-09 Edition.

¹⁰  The eurozone is the area encompassing those European Union member states in which the euro has been adopted as the single currency in which a single monetary policy is conducted under the responsibility of the Governing Council of the European Central Bank.  Currently there are 15 member states:  Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain.  Because Slovenia joined the eurozone in January 2007 and Cyprus and Malta joined in January 2008, the 2006 eurozone estimates cited in this chapter exclude these member states.  Because of limited data availability, the 2007 estimates exclude Slovenia.

¹¹  July 2008 estimates from the CIA World Factbook, available online at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/.

¹²  A Chartbook of International Labor Comparisons (available online at www.dol.gov/asp) and United Nations national accounts main aggregates database.

¹³  GDP estimates are in current U.S. dollars adjusted using purchasing power parities.

¹⁴  Comparisons of data based on levels of hours worked for a given year are not precise because of differences in data sources methods of estimation.

¹⁵  U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data (CCD), "State Nonfiscal Survey of Public Elementary/Secondary Education.”  Findings available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2007/2007352.pdf and http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/2007/section3/tableXLS.asp?tableID=701.

¹⁶  See the BLS publication  “College Enrollment and Work Activity of 2007 High School Graduates” USDL 08-0559, April 25, 2008.  http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/hsgec.pdf.

¹⁷  This chapter draws heavily on valuable research by Mitra Toossi of the Bureau of Labor Statistics published as “A new look at long-term labor force projections to 2050” in the Monthly Labor Review, November 2006.

¹⁸  Census Bureau, monthly population estimates, available online at http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html (last visited July 2008).

¹⁹  BLS defines the economic dependency ratio as the number of persons in the total population (including children and the Armed Forces) that are not in the labor force per 100 of those who are in the labor force.

²⁰  Census Bureau, Annual Estimates of the Population by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1, 2000 to July 1, 2007 (NC-EST2007-03).

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