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December, 2001, Vol. 124, No. 12

A first look at employment and wages using NAICS

David R. H. Hiles

In the fall of 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release industry employment, wages, and establishment count data for 2001 based on the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) structure. This article presents the first glimpse of the data. By previewing these data, users can begin to acquaint themselves with the new structure. The data presented in this article are based on preliminary private sector U.S. totals for the first quarter of 2001. This, the first BLS data based on NAICS, comes from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages or QCEW/ES–202 program.¹ 

Every business and government establishment in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with employees covered by unemployment insurance programs, files quarterly unemployment tax reports. CEW data are derived from these reports. In the first quarter of 2001, these reports accounted for more than $1.2 trillion in wages, of which more than $1 trillion was paid to private sector employees. Data are produced on monthly employment, quarterly wages, and quarterly counts of establishments. State Employment Security Agencies (SESAS) and BLS work cooperatively to conduct the CEW program.² 

This excerpt is from an article published in the December 2001 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes
1 The companion article, "Implementing the North American Industry Classification System at BLS," by James A. Walker and John B. Murphy, on pages 15–21, provides a general background on NAICS and a timetable for BLS implementation in all of its programs.

2 SESAS, for example, are State Departments of Labor or Workforce Commissions.

Related BLS programs

Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages

Related Monthly Labor Review articles

Introducing the North American Industry Classification System.—July 1998.