October 25, 2000 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)
Earnings
by occupation in 1998
Workers in the highest-paid occupation earned on average more than three times as much per hour as those in the lowest paid in 1998.
[Chart data—TXT]
Mean hourly earnings of workers in executive, administrative, and managerial positions were $28.63 in 1998, compared with $7.85 for those in service occupations.
The second-highest paid occupation in 1998 was professional specialty and technical, with an average of $23.63 per hour. The second-lowest was handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers, with mean hourly earnings of $9.52. In the remaining occupations, hourly earnings averaged between $10 and $20.
These data are from the BLS National
Compensation Survey program. In this article, earnings are the
straight-time hourly wages or salaries paid to employees in private
industry. The mean is computed by totaling the pay of all workers and
dividing by the number of workers, weighted by hours. Learn more in
"National Compensation Survey: Occupational Wages in the United
States, 1998," BLS Bulletin 2529 (PDF
649K).
Of interest
Spotlight on Statistics: National Hispanic Heritage Month
In this Spotlight, we take a look at the Hispanic labor force—including labor force participation, employment and unemployment, educational attainment, geographic location, country of birth, earnings, consumer expenditures, time use, workplace injuries, and employment projections.
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Read more »