Labor cost is a significant portion of the production cost of every industry. This is particularly true for the transportation industries, which are much more labor intensive than industry as a whole. Changes in labor cost directly affect the price of transportation services, the profit margin, and competitiveness of the transportation industries.
As total compensation cost increases, the balance between wages and salaries and benefits also changes over time. These changes reflect changes in economic environment and labor management practices of employers.
|Transportation Industry (Index)||Q2 01||Q2 02|
|Total compensation (private)||133.67||140.04|
|Total compensation (private) percent change from same quarter previous year||3.60||4.77|
|Wages and salaries (private)||130.75||137.21|
|Wages and salaries (private) percent change from same quarter previous year||3.96||4.94|
NOTES: The current value is compared to the value from the same period in the previous year to account for seasonality.
Employment costs of transportation industry is the weighted average of the employment costs of all occupations working in transportation industries, including nontransportation industries. Employment costs of transportation occupations is the weighted average of the employment costs of all transportation occupations, including those working in non-transportation industries, such as truck drivers working for retail stores.
The base period of the original index is Q2 1989. The first quarter of 1992 is set to be the new reference point (=100) by dividing the values of the original index by the value of Q1 1992 in the original index. It is important to point out that this process changes only the reference point, and not the base period of the index because the weight structure of the index did not change.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Cost Trends, available at http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ect/.