Median weekly earnings of the 112.8 million full-time workers in the U.S. rose 3% year-over-year to a non-seasonally adjusted $827 in the third quarter of 2016, according to the Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Thursday morning. Data were compiled from the Current Population Survey, a nationwide survey conducted by the BLS.
In the construction and extraction workforce, median weekly earnings (not seasonally adjusted) for all full-time employees increased 6.4% from $721 in 3Q2015, to $767 in 3Q2016. The number of full-time workers employed in construction and extraction occupations also expanded in this quarter, to a total of 6.4 million from 3Q2015’s 6.0 million.
Male workers continue to out earn their women colleagues across the board, including the construction industry. The median weekly earnings for a woman working full-time in construction and extraction in 3Q2016 is $692, just 90.1% of the $768 for a man. At the same time, male workers continue to significantly outnumber their female colleagues in the industry, as 6.2 million of the 6.4 million, or about 97%, of full-time workers are men.
Full-time workers in installation, maintenance, and repair occupations made a median weekly wage of $850 in the third quarter of 2016, down -2.1% year-over-year. Compared to the third quarter in 2015, when women’s earnings outnumber men’s, women workers saw a sharp 21.2% decline in weekly earnings in this quarter, earning about $723 for a week, which is just 84.8% of what men make in the same period of time. Such a drop in earnings, however, doesn’t seem to discourage women from joining the ranks, as the number of female workers rose by 35.2% to 155,000 in this quarter. In contrast, male workers slightly dropped from last year’s 4.14 million to 4.08 million, pushing down the total number of employees in installation, maintenance and repair occupations in this quarter.
Read the full Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers here>>
