The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 128.28 in July from a downwardly revised 127.89 in June, and is up 1.6% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The June number was originally reported as 128.13.
"The Employment Trends Index is still suggesting that job growth will slow in the coming months, despite strong employment numbers for June and July," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "It is surprising that hiring has been so robust, given the current slow economic growth environment. Perhaps, economic growth is actually stronger than the anemic 1.2 percent GDP growth reported for the past four quarters."
The rise in ETI was driven by positive contributions from five of its eight components.
The increasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, job openings, industrial production, and initial claims for unemployment insurance, 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).
