United States Department of Labor
This week BLS published a new edition of Spotlight on Statistics that presents a series of graphics on tenure of American workers. Information on employee tenure—the length of time that workers have been with their current employer—can be useful for understanding long-term trends in the labor market. A number of factors can affect the median tenure of workers, including changes in the age profile among workers and changes in the number of hires and separations. The median employee tenure—the point at which half of all workers had more tenure and half had less tenure—was 4.6 years in 2012. Median tenure has trended up since 2000, when it was 3.5 years. The long-term rise in tenure reflects, in part, the aging of the workforce. In 2012, the median age of employed persons was 42.3 years, up from 39.4 years in 2000.
BLS also recently published a new Monthly Labor Review article that examines wage estimates by job characteristic from the BLS National Compensation Survey (NCS) and Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) programs. Both programs collect and report information about the hourly earnings of workers by occupation. This article describes a procedure that combines data from these programs to produce a consistent set of wage estimates by area, occupation, and job characteristic. The procedure takes advantage of the large sample size of the OES survey and the detailed information about job characteristics from the NCS to provide more extensive information about the wage rates of workers than either program can produce individually.
Finally, here is a link to my statement on the August employment situation news release: