The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) crept up 0.29% to 108.34 in June from a downwardly revised 108.23 in May, originally reported as 108.34, and is up 5.6% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"The Employment Trends Index has been flat since February, suggesting that slow employment growth is likely to continue through the summer," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "Since there is little hope of acceleration in the pace of economic activity any time soon, these weak labor market conditions are likely to persist for the coming months."
The decrease in the ETI was driven by negative contributions from four of the eight components: percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, initial claims for unemployment insurance and percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get."
The ETI aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the ETI include: Percentage of respondents who say they find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey); Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor); Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation); Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics); Part-time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS); Job Openings (BLS); Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board); and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).
