Real wages fall in the United States

[zoidberg]

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf

The new wage data just came out. I assume this information is part of the public domain. The charts from the links provide good data on different demographics as well as distributions.

Real wages fall Median weekly earnings of the nation's 100.4 million full-time wage and salary workers were $616 in the second quarter of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 1.8 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.2 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period.

Women make less than men. But the gap is smaller for minorities Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $547 per week, or 79.0 percent of the $692 median for men. The female-to-male earnings ratios were higher among blacks (90.6 percent) and Hispanics (87.5 percent) than among whites (78.8 percent) or Asians (79.8 percent).

College graduates earn more than high-school dropouts (duh!) Full-time workers age 25 and over without a high school diploma had median weekly earnings of $394, compared with $547 for high school graduates (no college) and $969 for college graduates holding at least a bachelor's degree. Among college graduates with advanced degrees (professional or master's degree and above), the highest-earning 10 percent of male workers made $2,698 or more per week, compared with $1,794 or more for their female counterparts.