LaborBrief
Editorial method

How LaborBrief verifies a page

A page is publishable only when its source, period, required fields, interpretation, and internal links survive a repeatable preflight.

The current statistical release is BLS OEWS May 2025, published in 2026. LaborBrief downloaded the national and state XLSX archives from the BLS table page, retained the archives in the build cache, and transformed published rows without interpolation. Occupations were sorted by national employment only after the source universe was fixed.

National occupation profiles require at least eight nonempty values among employment, hourly and annual wage measures, and percentiles. State-occupation cells require employment, jobs per 1,000, location quotient, annual mean, annual median, and hourly mean. In the full top-100 matrix, 235 of 5,093 candidate cells were incomplete or suppressed and were not turned into pages.

State references combine sources without blending their dates: May 2025 OEWS estimates, the DOL wage table updated July 1, 2026, the state labor-office contact table, and UI provisions effective January 1, 2026. Each state clears at least six confirmed fields. Paid leave, final pay, or at-will statements remain “not available” when a current primary source was not verified.

Worker-rights topics and guides must contain at least 350 words and at least two primary-source links. The build checks required disclaimers, data dates, titles, descriptions, image alternatives, chart alternatives, internal links, quality fields, and duplicate metadata. A sampled shingle comparison reports within-type similarity so programmatic pages do not pass merely because their numbers changed.

Corrections follow the source trail. Send the page URL, disputed value or sentence, primary-source URL, and effective date through Contact. LaborBrief updates the data file, rebuilds the affected pages, reruns the gates, and changes the verification date. The source inventory, date guide, suppression guide, and glossary explain the conventions.

Primary sources