Experimental Estimates of Compensation Levels and Trends for Workers in the 15 Largest Metropolitan Areas, 2004-05
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The BLS Employment Cost Index (ECI) is a principal Federal economic indicator for the United States. It measures the change in the cost of labor to employers over time. A related BLS program, the Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC), provides a comprehensive measure of the average cost in terms of dollars per hour of total compensation for U.S. workers, including the cost to employers for worker benefits, such as health insurance and retirement programs, along with wages and salaries. Since the inception of the two series, the only ECI and ECEC estimates available for geographic areas smaller than the entire United States have been for the broad groups of States that make up Census regions and divisions.

This article introduces experimental ECI and ECEC estimates for the 15 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, as ranked by total population in 2000.1 The first section of the article reports the new ECI estimates, which show 12-month rates of change in compensation covering the period 2003 to 2005. The next section reports the ECEC estimates for the level of compensation in the 15 areas for March 2004 and March 2005. The third section discusses how these experimental estimates differ from the other compensation estimates currently available for metropolitan areas from BLS.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Business and economics, Labor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.