Supplementary Information Used to Calculate Hours Data for Major Sector Productivity and Costs Series

To construct hours data for the major sector productivity and costs series, the BLS Division of Major Sector Productivity (DMSP) relies primarily on data from the BLS Current Employment Statistics program (CES).  The CES program provides monthly survey data on the number of jobs held by wage and salary workers, as well as the number of jobs and the average weekly paid hours of nonsupervisory and production workers, in nonfarm establishments.  DMSP uses this data to measure private nonfarm employee hours worked.  To supplement the data, DMSP requires additional information on employee hours.  The paid hours of nonsupervisory and production workers are adjusted to a broader measure of hours at work by an application of hours-worked to hours-paid ratios.  In addition, the hours worked by supervisory and nonproduction workers are calculated through the application of supervisory to nonsupervisory worker average weekly hours ratios.

Hours-Worked to Hours-Paid Ratios

Since the CES collects data on the paid hours of nonsupervisory workers, they include the hours for which an employee is paid but is absent from a job.   This includes factors such as holidays, sick leave and vacation time.   Since this time was not spent in the production of a good or performance of a service, the BLS believes that it should not be included when measuring productivity.  To remove these non-work hours from the hours-paid data, the DMSP uses hours-worked to hours-paid ratios developed from information on employer leave practices in the BLS National Compensation Survey (NCS).   The BLS Hours at Work Survey provided the ratios for years prior to 2000 (see "Hours at work ratios derived from the Employment Cost Index" (PDF).   These ratios are applied to hours-paid data, at the most detailed level available, to estimate hours at the workplace.

Supervisory (Nonproduction) to Nonsupervisory (Production) Worker Average Weekly Hours Ratios

The CES currently publishes average weekly hours information solely for production and nonsupervisory workers.  To estimate the hours of supervisory and nonproduction workers, DMSP relies on information from BLS Current Population Survey (CPS), which collects information on the average weekly hours worked by all persons in the civilian noninstitutional population.  Using information on the industry and occupation of wage and salary workers, DMSP calculates ratios of CPS supervisory worker average weekly hours to CPS nonsupervisory worker average weekly hours at the NAICS supersector level of detail.   (For information on how these ratios are constructed see "Construction of average weekly hours for supervisory and nonproduction wage and salary workers in private nonfarm establishments" (PDF).  For each sector, these ratios are multiplied by the adjusted nonsupervisory worker average weekly hours worked, as calculated above, to estimate average weekly hours of nonproduction and supervisory workers.

 

Last Modified Date: January 17, 2007