The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index (ETI) declined to 129.09 in February from an upwardly revised 129.15 in January, and is up 2.1% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The January number was originally reported as 128.93.
"The flatness of the Employment trends index since September suggests that the rapid job growth in recent months is likely to slow down," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "In particular, we are concerned about the temporary help industry component, one of the most powerful leading indicators of employment growth, which has declined for the second month in a row in February."
The slide in ETI was driven by negative contributions from five 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,” 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, and industrial production, 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).
