Second-quarter productivity report contains errors: BLS

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A report on second-quarter U.S. productivity released earlier on Tuesday contained mistakes on compensation and unit labor costs, but the errors would not affect overall productivity data, the Department of Labor said.

It said it would issue a corrected version "as soon as possible. The department earlier reported non-farm productivity, a gauge of hourly output per worker, had surged at a 6.4 percent rate in the second quarter after gaining 0.3 percent in the first quarter.

"The series containing the errors are compensation per hour, real compensation per hour, unit labor costs, and unit non-labor payments," the department said in a note published on its website.

An official with the department told Reuters that the overall productivity figures would not be affected.

"It will not affect the second quarter (productivity) data. What is going to be affected are indexes that include compensation as one of their components," he said.

"There are a few scattered changes to percent changes due to rounding. The indexes were re-based and we incorporated some of them on the wrong base year."

The department had reported unit labor costs down 5.8 percent in the second quarter, the biggest decline since the second quarter of 2000, after dropping a revised 2.7 percent in the January-March quarter.

Compensation per hour had been reported to have risen at a 0.2 percent pace, but adjusted for inflation, it was down 1.1 percent.

Unit labor costs were reported to have fallen 0.6 percent year-on-year. Compensation from a year earlier was reported to have increased 1.3 percent and was up 2.2 percent once adjusted for inflation.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani)