The Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics is recognized as an authoritative resource on the U.S. labor force. It continues and enhances the Bureau of Labor Statistics's (BLS) discontinued publication, Labor Statistics. The 15th Edition allows the user to understand recent developments as well as to compare today's economy with past history.
The Handbook is a comprehensive reference providing an abundance of data on a variety of topics including:
- employment and unemployment
- occupational safety and health
- international labor comparisons
Features of the publication
In addition to over 200 tables that present practical data, the Handbook provides:
- introductory material for each chapter that contains highlights of salient data and figures that call attention to noteworthy trends in the data
- notes and definitions, which contain concise descriptions of the data sources, concepts, definitions, and methodology from which the data are derived
- references to more comprehensive reports which provide additional data and more extensive descriptions of estimation methods, sampling, and reliability measures
New in the 15th Edition:
- recently released labor force and employment data/projections from 1990 to 2020 which include tables and figures on:
- fastest-growing occupations and the largest number of job openings between 2010 and 2020
- projected job openings by educational attainment, work experience, and on-the-job training between 2010 and 2020
- industries with the largest expected declines from 2010 to 2020
- changes in the labor force between 1990 and 2020
- additional tables on occupational safety and health and international labor comparisons
- a variety of new figures throughout the book on topics including the labor force, mean annual wages, employee compensation, and average annual rate of change in employment in 10 countries.
Some interesting facts found in the 15th Edition of the Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics:
- In 2010, the average employed person in the United States worked 1,741.4 hours. In comparison, the average employed person in Singapore worked 2,409.0 hours while the average employed person worked 1,426.1 hours in the Netherlands.
- The mean annual wage was $44,410 in 2010. Nine of the top ten paying occupations were either medical doctors or orthodontists. Chief executives were the lone occupation not in the health profession.
- The mean average wages of those in the education, training, or library professions ranged from $24,880 for teacher assistants to $107,990 for postsecondary law teachers.
- The number of workers belonging to a union continued to decline for the second straight year in 2010 after increasing in 2007 and 2008. Approximately 14.7 million workers were union members in 2010.
- The unemployment rate increased to 9.6 percent in 2010—the highest unemployment rate since 1983.
- Among private industry workers, 29 percent of same sex unmarried domestic partners had access to medical care benefits compared with 33 percent of ame sex unmarried domestic partners in state and local governments in March 2011.
- From January 2011 to September 2011, the number of mass layoff events (seasonally adjusted), reached 13,597 while the number of initial claims rose to 1,293,827. During the same time period in 2010 there 14,639 mass layoff events and 1,376,397 initial claims.
- Transportation and material moving workers had the longest average workday (8.34 hours), followed by production workers (8.25 hours) and construction and extraction workers (8.14 hours). Service workers had the shortest day on average (7.03 hours) in 2010.
- Multiple jobholders were nearly twice as likely to work at home than single job holders (38.9 percent compared to 21.8 percent).
- There were 933,200 nonfatal occupational injuries among private industry workers requiring days away from work in 2010. Nearly 27.5 percent of these cases required an employee to be away from work for 31 days or more while another 6.4 percent required an employee to be away from 21 to 30 days.
- In 2010, average annual expenditures declined for the second consecutive year after increasing every year from 2000 and 2008
- The two-year average median household income in 2009–2010 was $50,022—the lowest it has been since 1996–1997. It ranged from a high of $66,187 in Connecticut to a low of $36,821 in Mississippi.
- While work-related fatalities from highway incidents, falls, and homicides declined in 2010, the number of fatalities resulting from fires more than doubled from 2009 to 2010.