The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index slid to 100.95 in September from an upwardly revised 101.37 in August, originally reported as 100.80, and is up 4.4% from a year ago, the group announced Tuesday.
“Despite the somewhat better-than-expected employment numbers released on Friday, the decline in the Employment Trends Index in September suggests that weak job growth is likely to continue for the rest of 2011,” said Gad Levanon, associate director for macroeconomic research at the Conference Board. “Even as the economy remains slow going into the next year, we do not expect a major acceleration in layoffs, because employers have kept their workforce quite lean since the 2008-09 recession.”
The decrease in the ETI was driven by negative contributions from six out of the eight components. The weakening indicators include the board’s consumer confidence survey “jobs hard to get” status, initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill, part-time workers for economic reasons, industrial production, and real manufacturing and trade sales.
