The Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics is recognized as an authoritative resource on the U.S. labor force. It continues and enhances the Bureau of Labor Statistics's (BLS) discontinued publication, Labor Statistics. The seventeenth edition allows the user to understand recent developments as well as to compare today's economy with past history.

The handbook is a comprehensive reference providing an abundance of data on a variety of topics including:
*employment and unemployment;
*earnings;
*prices;
*productivity;
*consumer expenditures;
*occupational safety and health;
*union membership;
*international labor comparisons;
*and much more!

Features of the publication
In addition to over 200 tables that present practical data, the Handbook provides:
*introductory material for each chapter that contains highlights of salient data and figures that call attention to noteworthy trends in the data;
*notes and definitions, which contain concise descriptions of the data sources, concepts, definitions, and methodology from which the data are derived;
*references to more comprehensive reports which provide additional data and more extensive descriptions of estimation methods, sampling, and reliability measures.

The seventeenth edition of Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics also covers many new topics:
*Labor force and employment projections from 2012 to 2022
*More employee benefit tables including: financial benefits, nonproduction bonuses, and unmarried domestic partner benefits
*A section on volunteering in the United States
*Several new tables on international labor comparisons
*Figures on topics such as the labor force, household income, eldercare, labor productivity, and employment