Labor statistics, such as employment and unemployment rates and average rates of pay for workers, often cannot be cleanly separated from other technically nonlabor statistics such as data related to education and income. This is especially true in the United States, where the Bureau of Labor Statistics collaborates with the Census Bureau on several surveys that are used to generate both labor and nonlabor statistics. With one exception, this chapter discusses only data sets that are specifically and solely about labor. Data sets with a mix of labor and nonlabor statistics are included in chapter 20.
Major Sources: United States
Bureau of Labor Statistics (U.S. Department of Labor)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the primary source of data on the labor market in the United States. It is responsible, in whole or in part, for numerous surveys and other data collection activities. Despite its name, the BLS gathers data on much more than simply the labor market; it is also a key source of data on such economic topics as inflation, consumer spending, and productivity. The BLS data that deals directly with the labor market is listed below; other categories are covered in the chapters where they are most relevant. Note also that much BLS data is available through FRED (see chapter 8).
Current Employment Statistics (CES, www.bls.gov/ces/). This survey provides monthly information about number of workers, average hours worked, and average hourly wages by industry, 1990 to present. The CES survey covers most employees, but it does not include the self-employed, farm workers, and a few other small employment categories. It is also used to generate employment estimates for states and metropolitan areas; these estimates are available on a separate website (www.bls.gov/sae/home.htm).
Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (CEW, www.bls.gov/cew/). This census provides some data similar to that from the CES survey—number of workers and their average weekly wage by industry—but with a few important differences. The CEW contains additional data series, including number of establishments, total amount of wages paid, and average annual pay (wages or salaries). Because the CEW is a census (in which every employer provides information) rather than a survey (in which only a sample of employers are contacted), it is able to provide more detailed breakdowns of the data than the CES. The data is theoretically available for small geographic areas such as counties and metropolitan statistical areas and for specific industries—down to six-digit NAICS codes, which designate such specific industries as “boat dealers,” “strawberry farming,” and “bottled water manufacturing.” In practice, federal disclosure policies mean that much of this data may be restricted if too narrowly focused in geography, industry, or, especially, both at once (see chapter 1, for an explanation of why information about small groups is often suppressed from data releases such as these, as well as a fuller explanation of NAICS codes).
Occupational Employment Statistics (OES, www.bls.gov/oes/). In contrast to the CES and CEW reports, which gather employment and wage data by industry, Occupational Employment Statistics gathers data by occupation. The OES provides the number of people working in an occupation, fraction of all jobs in a specific occupation (expressed as jobs per 1,000 jobs), and data about the mean and various percentile wages for hundreds of specific occupations—everything from fundraisers, tax preparers, archivists, and computer network architects to bartenders, tree trimmers, aircraft cargo handling supervisors, and dredge operators. At the national level, there are also two indicators of the distribution of occupations in specific industries: percentage of workers employed in a given industry who are in that occupation, and percentage of establishments in a given industry that employ someone in a specific occupation. This data also allows for examining differences in mean and median wages between people working in the same occupation but in different industries, such as retail sales workers in automobile dealerships versus those in furniture stores. At the state and local level, there is data about how the fraction of jobs in a specific occupation in that area compares to the fraction of jobs in that occupation nationwide, an indicator called the “location quotient.”1
National Compensation Survey (NCS, www.bls.gov/eci/). Despite its name, the National Compensation Survey is not necessarily the best source for detailed data about wage and salary rates; products such as the CEW or OES are often better sources for this type of data, especially if data is needed for a specific occupation or geographic area.2 Instead, the NCS aims to provide an overall measurement of employment costs, which is the amount employers must pay, on average, to retain a single employee. This includes both wages and benefits such as health insurance and pension plans. This data is released in three major series: the Employment Cost Index, which measures relative changes in wages and salaries, benefits, and total compensation (wages and salaries plus benefits) for various broad industries and occupations; Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, which provides an average dollar figure for wages and for specific benefits (vacation time, overtime, health insurance, workers’ compensation payments, Social Security payments, etc.) by several business characteristics, including region of the country, metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan location, union versus nonunion business, broad type of occupation, broad industry, and business size (measured by number of employees); and the National Compensation Survey—Benefits (previously the Employee Benefits Survey), which contains data about workers’ access to approximately forty different benefits, from paid military leave to health insurance benefits for unmarried same-sex partners.
Employment Projections (www.bls.gov/emp/). The BLS also makes predictions about what the labor force will look like ten years into the future. The most commonly cited of these predictions are about how many people will be working in various occupations and industries in the future, but the BLS also releases projections on topics such as the number and demographics of people in the labor force and the number and demographics of people entering and leaving the labor force.3
Local Area Unemployment Statistics (www.bls.gov/lau/). As its name suggests, this program provides basic employment/unemployment data (number of people employed, number of people in the labor force, and number and percentage of people unemployed) for subnational areas of the United States, including states, counties, regions, metropolitan and micropolitan areas, and some cities and towns (in New England, all cities and towns; in the rest of the country, only those with populations over 25,000).
Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (www.bls.gov/jlt/). This survey provides monthly data by broad industry for six indicators of turnover, 2000 to present. The indicators are job openings, people hired, total number of people who left jobs, and three types of separations: people who quit, people who were laid off, and people who left their job for another reason.
Current Population Survey (www.bls.gov/cps/). The Current Population Survey and its predecessors have been surveying Americans about their employment status since 1940, although the various online interfaces to the data typically offer access only back to the 1960s, at best. The modern Current Population Survey continues to be used to generate unemployment and labor force statistics, but it has also expanded to include many other topics, both employment-related and socioeconomic (education, income, etc.). Because of the breadth of the survey, the CPS is of interest to many researchers, not just labor economists. The data from this survey can be and has been used to inform many political and social debates: on the BLS site itself one can find statistics about number of working mothers, number of people not employed because of poor health, number of workers who are part of a union, and number and percentage of workers in various industries who earn at or below minimum wage, for example, all generated from the Current Population Survey. The Census Bureau (which comanages this survey with the BLS) produces and disseminates additional statistics from the data. Microdata from the Current Population Survey is available from multiple sources (see chapter 20 for more information about accessing this data).
Major Sources: World
International Labour Organization
The International Labour Organization (ILO, www.ilo.org), part of the United Nations, compiles a great deal of data about workers and the labor market. For many years its major database was LABORSTA (http://laborsta.ilo.org), but LABORSTA has recently been replaced by a new database, ILOSTAT (www.ilo.org/ilostat/). Some data in ILOSTAT is available as far back as 1945 for some countries, including the size of the economically active population and the number of people working in various industries and occupations; other data, including employment and unemployment numbers and rates and the numbers and rates of occupational injuries in various industries, are available as far back as 1969, although again only for some countries. Other data with shorter time series includes average hours worked per week and average earnings in a large number of occupations, as well as data about migrant workers.
Key Indicators of the Labour Market (KILM, http://kilm.ilo.org) is another major data source from the ILO. The data is available in an interactive online interface (http://kilm.ilo.org/kilmnet/), as a PDF, and as downloadable software. The data, which spans the years 1980 to present, covers topics similar to those included in ILOSTAT—e.g., employment and unemployment rates, hours worked, wages—although there are a few variables that are included only in one of the two sources. However, whereas ILOSTAT merely disseminates data reported to the ILO by individual countries, the team that produces KILM works to harmonize the data, making it safer to attempt cross-country comparisons.
Minor Sources
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
Although the BLS is the primary disseminator of U.S. labor statistics, a few other government agencies also release their own employment-related data. One of these is the Census Bureau, which publishes several labor-related data series. These include the Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI), one of the data sets contained in the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program (LEHD, http://lehd.ces.census.gov), as well as Nonemployer Statistics (www.census.gov/econ/nonemployer/).
The QWI is unusual among labor data sets in that it is longitudinal (it follows workers over a period of time) and that it is compiled from administrative data (specifically, employers’ quarterly submissions to each state’s unemployment insurance office) rather than from surveys or censuses. It allows for detailed breakdowns—down to counties or metropolitan statistical areas geographically; to two-digit NAICS codes by industry; and by race, age group, education, and gender of employees—for total employment, increase or decrease in number of jobs, newly created jobs, newly hired employees, employees leaving jobs, turnover, average monthly earnings, and average earnings for new hires.
The Census Bureau also provides data on self-employed workers, a group that is left out of some BLS resources for employment statistics. Nonemployer Statistics provides industry-level counts and receipts for businesses with no employees other than the owner of the business—for example, a self-employed hairdresser or a freelance graphic designer—at the national, state, county, and metropolitan and micropolitan statistical area levels. Another economically focused Census Bureau data set that includes the self-employed is the Survey of Business Owners (www.census.gov/econ/sbo/; see chapter 10).
Notes
1. For example, in 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home of the University of Michigan, 6.24 per 1,000 jobs belonged to “English Language and Literature Teachers, Postsecondary” (i.e., English professors, or other types of English instructors, at a college or university). The location quotient for that occupation in that location was 11.19, indicating that English professors were more than eleven times more common in the Ann Arbor workforce than in the workforce of the United States as a whole, where only 0.558 out of every 1,000 jobs belonged to English professors.
2. The NCS was once better at providing detailed data for small geographic areas and for specific jobs or industries, but one of its components, the Locality Pay Survey, was one of several statistical programs eliminated as part of federal budget cutting in 2011. Archived data from this program, 1997–2010, is still available online (www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/).
3. State agencies use data from the BLS to make their own similar estimates for each state. These estimates are available from each state’s labor agency, but they have also been gathered into a single website, Projections Central (www.projectionscentral.com).