The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 127.76 in February from a downwardly revised 127.62 in January, and is up 6.7% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The January number was originally reported as 127.86.
"The Employment Trends Index increased for the 14th consecutive time, the longest positive stretch in 30 years," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "Strong job growth and the rapid decline in the unemployment rate are likely to continue, and acceleration in wage growth is just a matter of time."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from five of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest positive contributor to the smallest — were percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, real manufacturing and trade sales, industrial production, 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).
