The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) climbed to 127.89 in July from a downwardly revised 127.57 in June, and is up 4.4% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The June number was originally reported as 129.11.
"The growth in the Employment Trends Index slowed down in the past 3-6 months, suggesting that we may see somewhat slower job growth in the months ahead," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "Still, with almost no expansion of the labor force, a slowing of employment growth to 150,000-200,000 jobs a month would be enough to rapidly tighten the labor market."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from five of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were industrial production, initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, real manufacturing and trade sales, 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).
