Question: How are labor hours calculated for productivity measures?

Answer: The primary source of hours and employment data is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES) program, which provides data on total employment and average weekly hours of production and nonsupervisory workers in nonagricultural establishments.

For the quarterly productivity measures, the Hours at Work Survey is used to convert the CES hours to hours at work by excluding all forms of paid leave. In manufacturing, average weekly hours for nonproduction workers are developed from BLS studies which provided data on the regularly scheduled workweek of white-collar employees. For nonmanufacturing sectors, all employees are assumed to work the same hours as nonsupervisory employees. Because CES data include only nonagricultural wage and salary workers, data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are used for farm employment as well as for nonfarm proprietors and unpaid family workers. Government enterprise hours are developed from the National Income and Product Account estimates of employment combined with CPS data on average weekly hours.

For the industry productivity measures, for manufacturing industries, the nonproduction worker hours are developed, similar to the quarterly measures, from BLS studies, which provided data on the regularly scheduled workweek of white collar workers. For nonmanufacturing industries, supervisory worker average weekly hours are a constant and total hours vary according the changes in employment.

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