The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 115.76 in December from an upwardly revised 115.72 in November, and is up 5.2% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"Despite the disappointing job numbers for December, the improvement in the Employment Trends Index is signaling solid employment growth in the months ahead," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "With the labor force barely growing, partly due to the massive wave of baby boomers retiring, this job growth will continue to rapidly bring down the unemployment rate."
The gain in ETI was driven by negative contributions from six of its eight components. The increasing indicators - from the largest negative contributor to the smallest - were number of temporary employees, consumer confidence survey percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," job openings, industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, and percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, 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).
