The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) rose to 134.62 in August from a downwardly revised 133.60 in July, first reported as 133.77, and is up 4.6% from a year ago, the group announced Tuesday.
"The rapid growth in the Employment Trends Index continued in August, suggesting solid job growth in the months ahead," said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. "While Friday’s job numbers were slightly disappointing, the ETI does not provide any indication of slowing employment growth."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were percentage of respondents who say they find “jobs hard to get,” industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, initial claims for unemployment insurance, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, and number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, 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).
