In This Chapter

Chapter 5.
Employment and Wages Covered by Unemployment Insurance

Presentation
Employment and Wages, an annual BLS publication, presents State and national totals for covered employment and wages by broad industry division, major industry group, and detailed 4-digit industry. Data for government workers are shown by State and selected industries. The publication includes distributions of employment and wages by size of reporting unit for each major industry division for the United States as a whole. These data are distributed into 10 employment-size categories.

A comparison of the average annual pay across States, and the pay levels by industry division within States is made in an annual news release issued in late Summer or early Fall. A comparison of average annual pay in metropolitan areas is made in a news release that follows shortly after the State and Industry comparison. Both news releases can be accessed from the BLS Internet site.

To preserve the anonymity of establishments, BLS withholds publication of data for any geographic industry level in which there are fewer than three firms or in which the employment of a single firm accounts for over 80 percent of the industry. At the request of a State, data are also withheld where there is reason to believe that the "fewer than three" rule would not prevent disclosure of information pertaining to an individual firm or would otherwise violate the State's disclosure provisions. Information concerning Federal employees, however, is fully disclosable.

In addition to published information, county and metropolitan data and historical information are available from the BLS Washington office either on hard copy or on machine-readable media such as magnetic tapes and diskettes on a cost reimbursable basis. The charge for this service varies according to the complexity and volume of the request. Write to the Division of Occupational and Administrative Statistics, Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington, DC 20212.

The individual States, which have a wide variety of uses for the data, usually publish their own reports containing ES-202 data.

Next: Uses