NEW YORK – The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index (ETI) slid to 96.7 in August from a revised 97.4 in July, originally reported as 97.0, and is up 9.8% from a year ago, the group announced today.
"Employment growth has been slow lately, and the Employment Trends Index suggests that it may slow even further this fall," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "However, we still expect job growth rather than an outright decline in the next several months."
August’s decline in the ETI, the second in the past four months, was driven by negative contributions from seven out of the eight components. The weakening indicators were: Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”, Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Part-Time Workers for Economic Reasons, Job Openings, Industrial Production and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales. The last time seven components contributed negatively to the overall index was March 2009.
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).
