The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) fell to 128.02 in August from an upwardly revised 128.44 in July, and is up 0.8% from a year ago, the group announced Tuesday.
The July number was originally reported as 128.28.
"The Employment Trends Index is consistent with moderating job growth in the second half of 2016," said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. "With the ongoing massive retirement of baby boomers, even moderate job growth is enough to continue to tighten the US labor market."
The slip in ETI was driven by negative contributions from seven of its eight components.
The decreasing indicators — from the largest contributor to the smallest — were percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, job openings, initial claims for unemployment insurance, industrial production, real manufacturing and trade sales, and the number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, 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).
