Senator Sam Brownback, Senior Republican Senator of the Joint Economic Committee, has released an 11 page article titled Understanding Worker Pay: Wages, Salaries, and Benefits. The article describes and considers various measures of worker pay to assess how workers have fared in recent periods and how the recent behavior of worker pay compares with the past. The data that are examined are: usual weekly earnings, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Population Survey; average hourly earnings, from the BLS Current Employment Statistics survey; hourly compensation, from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey; hourly compensation, from the BLS productivity statistics program; employee compensation, from the Bureau of Economic Analysis National Income and Product Accounts; and the employment cost index, from the BLS National Compensation Survey.


Comprehensive measures of worker pay which include the important benefits components of overall worker compensation indicate that on an inflation-adjusted basis, worker pay has grown, on average, at healthy rates since the beginning of 2001. Workers have been making real gains through an ability to purchase more goods and services with the increases in nominal wages and benefits that they receive.


The 11 page article is available at https://www.jec.senate.gov/republicans/_files/UNDERSTANDINGWORKERPAYWAGESSALARIESANDBENEFITS20070615.pdf.