The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) climbed to 129.33 in December from a downwardly revised 128.27 in November, and is up 2.6% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The November number was originally reported as 128.69.
"The Employment Trends Index rebounded sharply in December, nearly erasing November's entire decline," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "However, the slowdown in the ETI growth rate in recent months, combined with weak GDP growth in the fourth quarter, suggests that the pace of job growth is likely to slow in the coming months."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were number of temporary employees, percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," real manufacturing and trade sales, industrial production, job openings, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, and ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, 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).
