By Patrick Thomas 

A union job at a shipyard, mine or factory usually comes with a steady paycheck, but some U.S. industrial companies are having a hard time figuring out who their typical workers are and how much they make.

Several S&P 500 companies in the industrials and materials sector posted big swings in what they said their median worker was paid in 2018 compared with 2017, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of annual disclosures for hundreds of big U.S. companies as provided by MyLogIQ.

Shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. and potash producer Mosaic Co. reported the typical worker got half as much as the year before. At Honeywell International Inc., it was 33% higher.

The reasons vary. Some fluctuations reflect acquisitions or spinoffs that revamp a company's workforce. Others are attributable to whether the median employee has a traditional pension plan, or new ways of identifying that middle employee.

Huntington Ingalls, which builds U.S. Navy aircraft carriers and other vessels in Virginia and Mississippi, reported the pay of its median employee was $69,824 in 2018, compared with $132,546 in 2017. A spokesman said the median employee identified in 2017 was a unionized steelworker who had a defined-benefit pension that was included in the compensation figure. The counterpart for 2018 didn't have a defined-benefit pension.

At Mosaic, which mines fertilizer ingredients in the U.S. and abroad, the median pay fell by half to $41,594 in 2018, from $88,792. But the change was likely tied to the company's acquisition of operations from Brazil miner Vale SA, which nearly doubled Mosaic's workforce to more than 13,000 last year. Mosaic didn't respond to requests for comment.

Defense contractor Raytheon Co. said its typical worker made $110,802 in 2018, about 23% less than a year earlier as benefits for the designated worker fell to $8,573 from $36,758 in 2017. A Raytheon spokesman said the employees were in different legacy pension plans.

Despite these swings, the typical median pay reported for 2018 by companies in the industrials and materials sector analyzed by the Journal was roughly $67,000, up about 1.5% from 2017. Of the companies, 53 reported increases and 22 reported declines.

Boeing Co., which had the highest 2018 median pay in the group, said its median worker made $126,991, up 14% from a year earlier. Boeing didn't respond to requests for comment. General Electric Co., which employs about 283,000 people, a majority of whom are overseas, said its median worker was paid $58,204 in 2018, up 2%.

Industrial conglomerate Honeywell International Inc. said its median pay was $66,749, compared with $50,296 the prior year. Honeywell said the figure rose as the company had 20,000 fewer employees in 2018 after it spun off two separate companies.

Atlanta-based Rollins Inc., which runs pest-control services such as Orkin, reported its median worker's pay jumped 34% to $111,960. A spokeswoman said the increase was because many employees have commission-based pay.

Most publicly traded U.S. firms are disclosing their median employee pay for a second straight year, along with compensation for top executives. Firms must include part-time and temporary workers, but not contractors, and have the option of annualizing pay for some midyear hires and excluding midyear acquisitions.

Companies may exclude up to 5% of their global workforce, but only non-U. S. workers, and may use sampling techniques to identify the median employee.

The Journal analysis, based on data from MyLogIQ for more than 1,300 companies, combined the industrials and materials sectors as defined by S&P Global. Those sectors include industry groups encompassing capital goods, commercial and professional services, materials, and transportation companies.

Check out this interactive link for the full ranking of companies or to search for a specific company or industry.

--Theo Francis contributed to this article.

Write to Patrick Thomas at Patrick.Thomas@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 02, 2019 07:39 ET (11:39 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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