The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) Continues to Decline

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Sep 06, 2011, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) decreased again in August to 100.8, down from July's revised figure of 101. The August figure is up 4.1 percent from a year ago.

Says Gad Levanon, Associate Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board: "While the Employment Trends Index has been on a slightly declining trend in recent months, the decline in the index is still not as strong as it was in the months leading to previous recessions. We still expect the economy to moderately add jobs in the next several months, but not fast enough to lower the unemployment rate."

This month's decrease in the ETI was driven by negative contributions from six out of the eight components. The weakening indicators include The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey® "Jobs Hard to Get," Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Part-Time Workers for Economic Reasons, Job Openings, Industrial Production and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales.

The Employment Trends Index 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 Employment Trends Index 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)
Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: http://www.conference-board.org/data/eti.cfm.

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SOURCE The Conference Board