Timeline

Below are major milestones in BLS history, grouped by decade. Click on the links within the timeline for more information.

1880s

• 1884 Bureau of Labor created in the Department of Interior.
• 1886 Published First Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor: Industrial Depressions.
• 1888 Began first consumer expenditure survey.

1890s

• 1891 Investigated the effects of tariff legislation on wages and prices.
• 1898 Published Hand and Machine Labor, providing information on the effect of machinery costs of production, productivity, wages, and employment in selected industries.

1900s

• 1902 First published the wholesale prices collection, later called the Producer Price Indexes.

1910s

• 1912 Introduced series on industrial accidents.
• 1913 Began Consumer Price Indexes.
• 1913 Moved to the Department of Labor.
• 1915 Began first monthly studies of employment and payrolls (later called the Current Employment Statistics program).
• 1915 Published first Monthly Review (later called the Monthly Labor Review).
• 1916 Began first labor market information cooperative agreements with states.

1940s

• 1940 Began industry productivity studies program.
• 1942 Established first regional offices.
• 1945 Began providing training for international economists and statisticians.
• 1947 Established Business Research Advisory Council and the Labor Research Advisory Council.
• 1947 Produced first annual measures of output per hour.
• 1947 Released first report on work stoppages.
• 1948 Began publishing collective bargaining settlements.
• 1949 Published first Occupational Outlook Handbook.

1950s

• 1959 Gained responsibility for financing and analyzing the household survey (later called the Current Population Survey) and publishing the results.
• 1959 Published first labor productivity indexes for the total private and private nonfarm business sectors.

1960s

• 1960 Began conducting an annual nationwide survey, (later incorporated into the National Compensation Survey), which became the basis for comparing federal and private-sector pay under legislation passed in 1962 and 1971.
• 1962 Produced first major international comparative study on unemployment.
• 1966 Produced first projections of the labor force, industry output and employment, and occupational employment and job openings.

1970s

• 1971 Began International Prices Program by establishing export price indexes.
• 1971 Began collecting data (in cooperation with 15 states and the Employment and Training Administration) on occupational employment through the Occupational Employment Statistics program.
• 1973 Established import price indexes, as part of the International Prices Program.
• 1973 Began Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, mandated by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970.
• 1976 Began the Employment Cost Index.
• 1978 Began direct online computer access to more than 150,000 time series (LABSTAT).
• 1979 Introduced the first comprehensive study of the incidence and provisions on employee benefits )later called the Employee Benefits Survey).

1980s

• 1983 Published first multifactor productivity measures.
• 1983 Assumed full responsibility from the Employment and Training Administration for federal-state cooperative programs on labor market information, including Current Employment Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics, and in 1984, Employment and Wages (later called the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages).
• 1984 Began Mass Layoff Statistics program.
• 1985 Assumed responsibility from Employment and Training Administration for the National Longitudinal Surveys.
• 1986 Published first Employer Costs for Employee Compensation data.

1990s

• 1990 Began using electronic data collection with the computer assisted telephone interview in the Current Employment Statistics survey.
• 1992 Introduced revisions to the Occupational Safety and Health Statistics program, including the first nationwide Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries and new data on worker characteristics and the circumstances of workplace injuries and illnesses.
• 1995 Established website at www.bls.gov.
• 1996 Began collecting occupational wage data, in addition to occupational employment data for every state in the Occupational Employment Statistics program.

2000s

• 2000 Established the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee along with the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.
• 2002 Released the first national monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data providing the number and rate of job openings, hires and separations.
• 2002 Congress passed and the President signed the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act.
• 2003 Introduced Business Employment Dynamic data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, showing the job gains from opening and expanding establishments and job losses from closing and contracting establishments.
• 2004 Published the American Time Use Survey annual estimates providing information on the way Americans spend their time.
• 2007 Established the Data Users Advisory Committee to replace the Business and Labor Research Advisory Councils.
• 2008 Stopped printing and mailing news releases to subscribers, relying on email and the web for distribution instead.
• 2009 Published, for the first time, labor force estimates for people with disabilities in the Current Population Survey.

2010s

• 2010 Expanded hours and earnings data from the Current Employment Statistics program to include “all employees” in addition to “production and nonsupervisory employees.”
• 2010 Established the Technical Advisory Committee to advise BLS on statistical methodology and other technical matters related to the collection and analysis of BLS data.
• 2011 Revised data provided to meet the requirements of the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act to include information from both the National Compensation Survey and the Occupational Employment Statistics program.
• 2012 Released first-ever green jobs information.
• 2012 Tweeted for the first time from @BLS_gov.
• 2014 Introduced the Final Demand – Intermediate Demand system for the Producer Price Indexes program, measuring change in prices received by producers of goods, services, and construction products for final use (to consume or invest) or intermediate use (by businesses as inputs to further production).
• 2014 Began using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to automate coding in the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.
• 2014 Released Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages generated hurricane zone maps showing the potential risks to businesses and jobs from hurricanes on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts.
• 2016 Joined the Federal Statistical Research Data Center network to expand the availability of BLS microdata.
• 2016 Published, for the first time, data from the Occupational Requirements Survey about the physical demands, mental requirements, education and training, and environmental conditions of jobs.
• 2018 Introduced locality of destination export price indexes and the U.S. terms of trade indexes in the International Price Program.
• 2018 Published Current Population Survey findings on electronically mediated employment, or work that was obtained through a website or app.
• 2019 Began updating employment projections annually instead of every 2 years.

2020s

• 2020 With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, introduced new survey questions looking at the effect of the pandemic on labor market activity, surveyed businesses about pandemic changes to their operations and their sick leave policies, introduced new methods to ensure that productivity data reflected the rapid changes in employment at the start of the pandemic, and collected critical information on employer-reported cases of respiratory virus. Also introduced innovations in data collection methods.
• 2021 Released state data for the first time from the Productivity program and from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
• 2022 Expanded monthly labor force data to include American Indians and Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders, and People of Two or More Races.

Last Modified Date: August 4, 2023