Changes to the Current Employment Statistics Survey Hours and Earnings Series

Background

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is in the process of making several changes to the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey to improve its relevance to the needs of data users, as well as its value as an input to other key economic statistics. CES data on employment, hours, and earnings by industry are among the most visible and widely-used economic indicators at national, state, and metropolitan area levels. CES data are also among the timeliest economic indicators, with their release by BLS in the Employment Situation news release shortly after the end of the reference month.

The planned improvements to the CES are:

    Continuing to add new data on the hours and regular earnings of all employees; these data eventually will supplant existing data on hours and regular earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers.

    Continuing to add new data on total earnings—both regular and irregular pay—for all employees.

The current status of the planned changes to the CES is described below.

All employee hours and earnings series – The CES program currently publishes series on the average hours and earnings of production workers in the goods-producing industries and nonsupervisory workers in the service-providing industries. Production and nonsupervisory workers account for about 80 percent of all employment measured by the CES survey. The new all employee hours and earnings series will provide more comprehensive information than the present series for analyzing economic trends. They also will provide improved input for other major economic indicators, including series on nonfarm productivity and personal income. BLS tested the collection of all employee hours and earnings data with CES respondents and found the data available from the payroll records of most employers.

New data on gross monthly earnings – This series has a broader scope than the base CES earnings data. The current CES average hourly and weekly earnings series for production and nonsupervisory workers, as well as the new series planned for all employees, are designed to measure the regular earnings of workers; they exclude bonuses and other irregular payments received by employees from their employers. The gross monthly earnings series will include these irregular payments, providing an additional and more comprehensive measure of earnings. Furthermore, the gross earnings include all earnings paid during a full calendar month, while the regular earnings series are for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. The base average hourly earnings series will continue to provide a measure of underlying wage trends, exclusive of irregular payments. The gross monthly earnings series is expected to be particularly valuable for improving the accuracy of preliminary estimates of personal income in the national income accounts. Pilot tests with CES survey respondents indicate that most will be able to provide readily this information from their payroll records.

The new experimental data became available for a limited number of industry series on April 6, 2007. See www.bls.gov/ces/cesaepp.htm for more details. The industry detail available is as follows:

Total private

Goods-producing

  Natural Resources & Mining

  Construction

  Manufacturing

    Durable goods

    Nondurable goods

Private service-providing

  Trade, Transportation, & Utilities

    Wholesale trade

    Retail trade

    Transportation and warehousing

    Utilities

  Information

  Financial Activities

  Professional & Business Services

  Education and health services

  Leisure & Hospitality

  Other Services

CES published the following data types as experimental:

    • All employee average weekly hours
    • All employee average hourly earnings
    • All employee average overtime hours (manufacturing only)
    • All employee gross monthly earnings

Plan for production and nonsupervisory worker hours and earnings series – The current BLS plan is to reduce the amount of industry detail published, or eliminate these series entirely, after the new all employee hours and earnings series are well established. While the comprehensive all employee series will be more useful than the current limited scope series for analyzing overall market trends, the current production/nonsupervisory series will still be of interest to some users. However, the production and nonsupervisory worker hours and payroll data have become increasingly difficult to collect, because these categorizations are not identifiable in many payroll systems. Many survey respondents report that it is not possible to tabulate their payroll records based on the production/nonsupervisory definitions. BLS is thus exploring reduction or elimination of production/nonsupervisory series due to the declining sample sizes, and the respondent burden generated by continued collection of these data items. Any changes BLS decides to make will be in early 2010.

 

Last Modified Date: January 18, 2008