The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 118.58 in May from a downwardly revised 117.32 in April, and is up 5.4% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The April number was originally reported as 118.00.
"The Employment Trends Index continues to signal solid job growth with an improvement in each of its eight components in the first five months of 2014," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "The need for employers to rapidly expand their payroll in light of strengthening economic activity is a major factor in the rapid decline in the unemployment rate."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven its eight components. The increasing indicators - from the largest positive contributor to the smallest - were industrial production, initial claims for unemployment insurance, real manufacturing and trade sales, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, number of temporary employees, job openings, and percentage of respondents who say they find jobs hard to get," 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).
