The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 128.13 in June from a downwardly revised 126.42 in May, and is up 1.8% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The May number was originally reported as 126.81.
"The Employment Trends Index has been moving sideways in the first half of 2016, suggesting only moderate job growth in the coming months," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "In such an uncertain political and economic environment, U.S. businesses, which in total have been experiencing shrinking profits for over a year, are unlikely to rapidly expand their payrolls."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from all eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, real manufacturing and trade sales, number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, 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.
