Every wage figure on this network — and nearly every wage figure you'll see anywhere — traces back to the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program. It's the best public data available, and it's genuinely accurate for what it measures. The problem is what it doesn't measure.
What OEWS Actually Captures
OEWS collects and reports base wages — the hourly or annual rate an employer pays an employee. It does not include the dollar value of employer-provided benefits, most critically: pension and annuity contributions, and employer health-fund contributions.
Why This Specifically Distorts Union Trade Comparisons
In union trades, a meaningful share of total compensation flows through employer contributions to negotiated pension, annuity, and health and welfare funds — money that never appears as an hourly wage figure at all, but functions as real, guaranteed compensation. In union-dense trades, these fund contributions can add the equivalent of several dollars an hour in real value on top of the published wage rate.
Two electricians on paper earning the same base wage — one union, one open-shop — are not earning the same total compensation. The wage tables can't see the difference, because they were never designed to.
What This Means in Practice
- Comparing a union job offer to a non-union job offer using base wage alone systematically understates the union offer's real value. Always ask specifically about pension and health-fund contribution rates, not just the hourly wage, before comparing.
- Every "median wage" statistic for a union-heavy trade — linework, plumbing, and much of unionized electrical work among them — is likely understating real total compensation for the union-employed share of that workforce specifically.
- This cuts the other direction too: self-employed contractors and business owners aren't captured in OEWS data at all (it covers employees only), meaning the true top of the trade's earning distribution — often the highest earners in any given trade — is invisible in every wage table on this network and everywhere else that cites OEWS.
How to Read Wage Data Correctly From Here Forward
- Treat every OEWS median as a base-wage floor for employees, not a full compensation figure and not a ceiling.
- When comparing a specific union offer to a specific non-union offer, request the total compensation package — wage plus fund contributions — from both, not just the wage line.
- Remember that self-employed and business-owner earnings in every trade sit entirely outside this data.
For the full union-vs-non-union comparison built around this exact distinction: the Union Trades explainer site.