Jobs in 2005: How do they compare with their March 2001 counterparts?

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 129, Issue 7, 2006, Pages 15-26

  Maxfield, Julie Hatch ^a  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747252815     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: 00981818     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. U.S. business cycle expansions and contractions are determined by the National Bureau of Ecnomic Research (NBER). For information, see http//ww.nber.orgeycles/main.html.
2. Data on employment, hours, and earnings used in this article are from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program, which each month surveys 160,000 nonfarm businesses representing about 400,000 establishments. For more information on the CES program's concepts and methodology, see BLS Handbook of Methods, Bulletin 2490, (Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 1997). CES data are available on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov//ces/. Data used in this paper are seasonally adjusted unless otherwise noted.
3. The rest of this article concentrates on private employment. For more information on public employment, see Julies Hatch, "Employment in the public sector: two recessions' impact on jobs," Monthly Labor Review, October 2004, pp. 38-47.
4. For more information on the Asian crisis, see http://www.imf.org/ external/np/exr/facts/asia.htm.
5. For more information about manufacturing employment and the Asian crisis see Julie Hatch and Angela Clinton, "Job Growth in the 1990s: a restrospect," Monthly Labor Review, December 2000, pp. 3-18.
6. Worker Displacement, 2001-03, USDL 04-1381 (U.S. Department of Labor), July 30, 2004; on the Internet at www.bls.gov/news.release/disp.nr0.htm.
7. The time period examined was September 2001 to January 2002, when he majority of the declines occurred in transportation and warehousing.
8. For more information about business and professional services, see Rachel, Krantz, "Employment in business services: a year of unprecedented decline," Monthly Labor Review, April 2002, pp. 17-24.
9. For more information on employment trends in the construction industry, see the forthcoming article in the Monthly Labor Review by John Mullins.
10. The CES program currently produces hours and earnings for production or nonsupervisory workers. CES collects data for production workers in manufacturing and in natural resources and mining industries. In construction, the term construction workers covers workers, up through the level of working supervisors, who are engaged directly in a construction project. For private service-providing industries data are collected for nonsupervisory workers. Prodution workers as a percent of all workers have remained fairly constant over the years. Therefore, production and nonsupervisory workers trends are assumed to mimic the overall employment trends in each supersector. For an historical discussion on the decline in average weekly hours, see Katie Kirkland, "On the decline in average weekly hours worked," Monthly Labor Review, July 2000, pp. 26-31.
11. BLS has begun to collect hours and earnings data for all workers covered by the CES or establishment survey. For more information, see "Changes to the Current Employment Statistics Survey" webpage at http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesww.htm.
12. Total-private hours and earnings series started in 1964, so recessions 1969 forward are studied.
13. Aggregate hours are the product of production or nonsupervisory worers and average weekly hours, summed for all industries.
14. Aggregate hours (production workers multiplied by average weekly hours) were calculated for each industry sector and summed to get monthly aggregates. Each month's aggregate hours were divided by the total production workers for January 2000 to get fixed-weight average weekly hours for total-private employment.
15. Analysis of aggregate hours is based on the index of aggregate weekly hours, which uses the annual average 2002 aggregate weekly hours as a base.
16. Current dollar earnings are deflated by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). For the purpose of the Real Earnings series, the CPI-W is converted from the base of 1982-84 that is used in the official, published Consumer Price Index series to a base of 1982. Thus, the constant dollar average hourly and weekly earnings series are in 1982 dollars.
17. Aggregate payrolls (the product of production workers, average hourly earnings, and average weekly hours) are calculated for each industry and summed to get monthly aggregates. Each month's aggregate payrolls were divided by the total aggregate hours for January 2000 to get fixed-weight average hourly earnings for total-private employment
18. Analysis of aggregate payrolls is based on the index of aggregate weekly payrolls, which uses the 2002 annual average weekly payrolls as a base.