NEW YORK – The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index (ETI) fell to 99.7 in May from a downwardly revised 100.1 in April, originally reported as 100.5, and is up 5.3% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"Declines as we’ve seen in the Employment Trends Index in the last two months are usually associated with a slowdown in job growth," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. " We expect moderate job growth to continue, but it is becoming clear that employers are reacting to the growing uncertainty in the U.S. economy by slowing down hiring."
May’s decrease in the ETI, was driven by negative contributions from four out of the eight components. The declining indicators included percentage of respondents who say they find “jobs hard to get,” percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, number of temporary employees, and real manufacturing and trade sales, which is a forecasted component.
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).
