NA Not available.
1 Average hours and earnings. Private production and related workers in mining, manufacturing, and construction; nonsupervisory employees in other industries.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,Employment and Earnings, monthly, June issues and Internet site

http://stats.bls.gov/newsrels.htm*

Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Establishment Survey

Concepts

Establishment

An establishment is an economic unit, such as a factory, mine,or store, which produces goods or services. It is generally ata single location and engaged predominantly in one type ofeconomic activity. Where a single location encompasses twoor more distinct activities, these are treated as separateestablishments, provided that separate payroll records areavailable and certain other criteria are met.

Employment

Employment is the total number of persons employed full orpart time in nonfarm establishments during a specified payrollperiod. Temporary employees are included. In general, datarefer to persons who worked during, or received pay for, anypart of the pay period that includes the 12th of the month,which is standard for all Federal agencies collectingemployment data from business establishments. Nationalemployment figures for Federal Government establishments,however, represent the number of persons who were paid forthe last full pay period of the calendar month except for theDepartment of Defense, which reports the number of civilianemployees on the payroll the last day of the month;intermittent Federal Government workers are counted if theyperformed any service during the month.

Workers on an establishment payroll who are on paid sickleave (when pay is received directly from the employer); onpaid holiday or vacation; or who work during only a part ofthe specified pay period, even though they are unemployed oron strike during the rest of the pay period, are all counted asemployed. Persons on the payroll of more than oneestablishment during the pay period are counted in eachestablishment which reports them, whether the duplication isdue to turnover or dual jobholding. Persons are consideredemployed if they receive pay for any part of the specified payperiod, but they are not considered employed if they receiveno pay at all for the pay period. Since proprietors, theself-employed, and unpaid family workers do not have thestatus of paid employees, they are not included. Alsoexcluded from the employed are domestic workers inhouseholds; persons who are on layoff, on leave without pay,or on strike for the entire pay period; and persons who werehired but have not yet started work during the pay period. Theemployment statistics for government refer to civilianemployees only. All persons who meet these specificationsare included in the designation "all employees," regardless ofindustry.

In addition to employment data for all employees, the surveyalso collects data on a major category of workers in eachindustry, differentiated primarily to ensure the expeditiouscollection of current statistics on hours and earnings. Thesegroups of employees are designated production workers,construction workers, or nonsupervisory workers, dependingupon the industry.

Data are collected for production workers in manufacturingand mining industries. In manufacturing, this group coversemployees, up through the level of working supervisors, whoengage directly in the manufacture of the establishment'sproduct. Among those excluded from this category are personsin executive and managerial positions and persons engaged inactivities such as accounting, sales, advertising, routine officework, professional and technical functions, and force-accountconstruction. (Force-account construction is constructionwork performed by an establishment, primarily engaged insome business other than construction, for its own account andfor use by its own employees.) Production workers in miningare defined in a similar manner.

In construction, the term "construction workers" coversworkers, up through the level of working supervisors, whoare engaged directly on the construction project either at thesite or in shops or yards at jobs ordinarily performed bymembers of construction trades. Excluded from this categoryare executive and managerial personnel, professional andtechnical employees, and workers in routine office jobs.

In the remaining private sector industries (transportation,communications, and public utilities; wholesale and retailtrade; finance, insurance, and real estate; and services) dataare collected for nonsupervisory workers. Nonsupervisoryworkers include most employees except those in top executiveand managerial positions.

An employment benchmark is a reasonably complete count ofemployment used to adjust estimates derived from a sample.Adjustment is usually done annually. The basic source ofbenchmark data for the CES survey is data on "all employees"collected from employers by State employment securityagencies as a byproduct of the unemployment insurance (UI)system. About 98 percent of all employees on nonfarmpayrolls are covered by the UI system.

Hours and earnings

The hours and earnings series are based on reports of grosspayrolls and the corresponding paid hours for productionworkers, construction workers, or nonsupervisory workers.

Aggregate payrolls include pay before deductions for SocialSecurity, unemployment insurance, group insurance,withholding tax, salary reduction plans, bonds, and uniondues. The payroll figures also include pay for overtime, shiftpremiums, holidays, vacations, and sick leave paid directlyby the employer to employees for the pay period reported.They exclude bonuses, commissions, and other lump-sumpayments (unless earned and paid regularly each pay periodor month), or other pay not earned in the pay periodconcerned (e.g., retroactive pay). Tips and the value of freerent, fuel, meals, or other payments in kind are not included.

Total hours during the pay period include all hours worked(including overtime hours), hours paid for standby orreporting time, and equivalent hours for which employeesreceived pay directly from the employer for sick leave,holidays, vacations, and other leave. Overtime or otherpremium pay hours are not converted to straight-timeequivalent hours. The concept of total hours differs fromscheduled hours or hours worked. The average weekly hoursderived from the total hours reflect the effects of such factorsas unpaid absenteeism, labor turnover, part-time work, andstrikes, as well as fluctuations in work schedules.

Overtime hours are hours worked for which premiums werepaid because they were in excess of the number of hours ofeither the straight-time workday or workweek. Saturday andSunday hours (or 6- and 7th-day hours) are included asovertime only if overtime premiums were paid. Holiday hoursworked as overtime are not included unless they are paid forat more than the straight-time rate. Hours for which only shiftdifferential, hazard, incentive, or similar types of premiumswere paid are excluded from overtime hours. Overtime hoursdata are collected only from establishments in manufacturingindustries.

Average hourly earnings series, derived by dividing grosspayrolls by total hours, reflect the actual earnings of workers,including premium pay. They differ from wage rates, whichare the amounts stipulated for a given unit of work or time.Average hourly earnings do not represent total labor costs perhour for the employer, because they exclude retroactivepayments and irregular bonuses, employee benefits, and theemployer's share of payroll taxes. Earnings for thoseemployees not covered under the production worker andnonsupervisory categories are not reflected in the estimates.

Real earnings data (those expressed in 1982 dollars) resultfrom the adjustment of average hourly and weekly earnings bymeans of the Bureau's Consumer Price Index for Urban WageEarners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W); they indicate thechanges in the purchasing power of money earnings as a resultof price changes for consumer goods and services. These datacannot be used to measure changes in living standards as awhole, which are affected by other factors such as total familyincome, the extension and incidence of various socialservices and benefits, and the duration and extent ofemployment and unemployment. The long-term trends of theseearnings data are also affected by changing mixes offull-time/part-time workers, high-paid/low-paid workers, etc.

Straight-time average hourly earnings are approximated byadjusting average hourly earnings by eliminating onlypremium pay for overtime at a rate of time and one-half. Thus,no adjustment is made for other premium payment provisionssuch as holiday work, late shift work, and premium overtimerates other than those at time and one-half. Straight-timeaverage hourly earnings are calculated only for manufacturingindustries because data on overtime hours are not collected inother industries.

Industrial classification

Industrial classification refers to the grouping of reportingestablishments into industries on the basis of their majorproduct or activity as determined by the establishments'percentages of total sales or receipts for the previouscalendar year. This information is collected as anadministrative byproduct of the UI reporting system. All datafor an establishment making more than one product orengaging in more than one activity are classified under theindustry of the most important product or activity, based onthe percentages reported.

Industries are classified in accordance with the 1987Standard Industrial Classification Manual, Office ofManagement and Budget.