The Editor's Desk (familiarly shortened TED) at the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics, brings out daily "fresh information from all over the Bureau," coupled with intriguing data and links of note. On the site's homepage, visitors will find sections like Topics, Archive by Year, Archive by Program, and About TED. The Topics area includes a panoply of subjects, such as Benefits,...

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) maintains and analyzes data on "virtually all agreements in both private industry and state and local government covering 1,000 workers or more" at the Collective Bargaining Agreements homepage. The site provides statistics on major work stoppages (1947-1998) in addition to the quarterly BLS publication Compensation and Working Conditions. Also available is...

Bureau of Labor Statistics researchers Kenneth J. Stewart and Stephen B. Reed conclude that "inflation would have been lower from 1978 to the present if the current methods of calculating the CPI had been in place." Their report, titled CPI Research Series Using Current Methods, 1978-98 was preprinted for the June 1999 Monthly Labor Review. Stewart and Reed describe changes from CPI-U calculation...

The BLS has released the latest statistics on union membership. The figures show that the share of unionized workers continued to decline, accounting for just 14.1% of employment in 1997 compared with 14.5% in 1996. The sectors with the highest unionization rates are transportation and public utilities (26.0 percent), and construction (18.6 percent).

This website by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is packed with stats about housing. For anyone who is curious about how homeowners, renters, and the housing industry have taken the hits of the Great Recession, this site is a welcome resource. Available online or as a downloadable PDF, readers will learn about customer spending on household items, employment in residential construction and housing...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) posts this publication online, with sections downloadable as .pdf files. The release, the National Compensation Survey, is a redesign of BLS' compensation statistics to reflect the workplace of the 21st century. From the main page, users can access the full .pdf-format text of the survey results as well as a summary, and a wealth of other related sites and...

Several new items were released this week by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and this one resource of the four (available in .pdf format) might be particularly interesting to researchers. A summary of the employment situation (including employment status by race, sex, and age, reasons and duration of unemployment) is available at the last link in text format, and a link to a .pdf file of the...

The State of the Cities Data Systems (SOCDS) allow users to extract customized datasets on US cities based on statistics gathered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of the Census, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The SOCDS page links to the 1998 State of the Cities report (described in the June 30, 1998 Scout Report for Social Sciences) and provides three data...

For anyone looking for very detailed up-to-date statistics on just about any facet of the U.S. labor market and economy, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics webpage should be the first place to look. The site contains information on inflation and consumer spending, productivity, occupations, industries, business costs, and demographics. Of course, within each broad topical division, there are...

Thirteen percent of all American waged and salaried workers, or 16.5 million workers, were members of unions in 1999, reports the BLS. Government workers are four times as likely to be union members, and those employed by local governments, such as fire fighters and police officers, the most unionized, have 42.9 percent rate of membership.