The butcher makes $13.28 an hour, and the baker can expect to get about $11.65. As for the candlestick maker – she probably has taken a white-collar job.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday provided a snapshot of hourly wages in the Denver-Boulder-Greeley area Thursday as part of its its National Compensation Survey.
The survey, gleaned from in-depth interviews with 417 establishments employing 507,200 workers, lists average hourly wages for 66 occupations as of June 2004.
“The survey can give employers some guidelines to go by,” said Linda Nickisch, an economist with the bureau in Kansas City, Mo.
Companies looking to relocate, workers, job hunters and career guidance counselors also tap the data to find out what a competitive wage is, she said.
White-collar workers, who represented 64 percent of the Denver-area workforce, made $26.07 per hour on average.
Blue-collar workers, representing 22 percent of the workforce, made $15.82 an hour.
Service workers, the last group, represented 14 percent of the local workforce and earned on average $12.51 an hour.
Put them all together and the average hourly pay rate for metro-area workers was $21.94, or $45,635 annually.
That compares with an average hourly wage of $17.75 for the U.S. as of July 2003, the last available compensation survey.
Some noteworthy items from the survey:
University and college professors, earning $50.33 an hour on average, had the best pay of occupations surveyed, while waiters and waitresses made the least at $2.98 an hour, not counting tips.
Workers at establishments with 500 or more employees averaged $22.83 an hour. Workers at establishments with 50 to 99 employees made $17.15 an hour.
The metro area’s concentration of white-collar workers, 64 percent, surpasses the 52 percent of the nation as a whole.
Blue-collar union workers made $18.60 per hour, compared with $14.41 per hour for non- unionized workers.
Kurt Lieder, a fifth-year apprentice electrician at RMe Electric Corp. in Aurora, said he makes $23.13 an hour. He estimates that nonunion electricians with his level of experience make closer to $17 to $19 an hour.
“That is the salary portion,” he said. “That is not even counting the other perks.”
Unionization, however, didn’t provide any significant difference in white-collar pay, according to the survey.
Staff writer Aldo Svaldi can be reached at 303-820-1410 or asvaldi@denverpost.com.
