The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) declined to 126.81 in May from an upwardly revised 128.53 in April, and is up 0.7% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The April number was originally reported as 128.28.
" The Employment Trends Index decreased in May. Its continued weakness suggests that job growth will remain modest in the coming months," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. " Despite softening in the ETI, its recent decline is not nearly as large as those that have preceded past employment contractions."
The slide in ETI was driven by negative contributions from six of its eight components.
The decreasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, and job openings, according to the Conference Board.
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).
