BLS report: Employment in production occupations is 9 million in May 2017, 6.3% of all employment

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Yes, from a year ago. Just now being released.

Employment in production occupations is 9 million in May 2017, 6.3% of all employment

Economic News Release USDL-18-0486

Occupational Employment and Wages Summary

For release 10:00 a.m. (EDT) Friday, March 30, 2018

Technical information: [phone] * [e-mail] * www.bls.gov/oes
Media contact: [phone] * [e-mail]


OCCUPATIONAL EMPLOYMENT AND WAGES -- MAY 2017


Production occupations had employment of 9 million in May 2017, representing 6.3 percent of total national employment, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The largest production occupation was assemblers and fabricators, all other, including team assemblers (1.3 million) and the highest paying production occupation was nuclear power reactor operators ($94,350). The annual mean wage across all production occupations was $38,070, compared with the U.S. average wage of $50,620. (See table 1.)

The Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) program provides employment and wage estimates for over 800 occupations in the nation, states, and 600 areas. National data are available by industry for approximately 415 industry classifications and by ownership across all industries, schools, and hospitals. This news release features production, healthcare, and construction and extraction occupations, in addition to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) occupations and employment and wages by typical entry-level educational requirement. National employment and wage information for all occupations is shown in table 1.
....

OES data by ownership are available at www.bls.gov/oes/current/oessrci.htm.

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[progree]

1. It's interesting they include the median pay as well as the average pay

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm

For all 142,549,250 employed (May 2017), the mean hourly wage was $24.34 and the median hourly wage was $18.12

(doesn't say anything about if these are all full-time or not)

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Some time ago I found median weekly earnings of FULL TIME workers,

https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpswktab1.htm

but not corresponding hourly earnings or ones for all workers... Full-time workers undoubtedly make more than part-time workers on median and on average

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Anyway, people are always yammering at me about posting anything having to do with AVERAGE pay or income, making the point that if Bill Gates walked into a Salvation Army soup kitchen having 80 people, the AVERAGE net worth would be $1 billion. So average is garbage blah blah blah.

So I post average hourly earnings (and average weekly earnings) statistics for Production and Non-supervisory workers which hopefully is not distorted by a few extremely high earners (they all work for someone else for a wage salary, they aren't business entrepreneurs, they don't have any staff or anyone reporting to them, etc.).

But I'd prefer median over average if I could find it... Maybe the above ocwage link will lead me to median hourly and median weekly earnings on a monthly or quarterly basis, and even better, that also includes one that is inflation adjusted.