The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) slipped to 110.98 in March from an upwardly revised 111.62 in February, first reported as 111.15, and is up 3.1% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The base year of the composite index is 2016=100.
"After growing rapidly through most of 2017 and 2018, the Employment Trends Index has been fluctuating around a flat trend in recent months, suggesting that employment growth will continue, but at a slower rate through the summer," said Gad Levanon, chief economist, North America, at The Conference Board. " Particularly concerning was the decline in the number of workers employed by the Temporary-Help Industry, an important leading indicator and component of the ETI, which declined by one percent in the past three months. The main trends in the US labor market — including growing employment and labor force participation, tightening labor markets and accelerating wages — are likely to continue in 2019, but more modestly."
The decreasing indicators — from the largest 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, 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).
