The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) Declined in June

The ETI Has Been Flat Since February

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Jul 09, 2012, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, July 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) dipped to 107.47 in June, down from the revised figure of 108.23 in May. The June figure is 5.6 percent higher than a year ago.

"The Employment Trends Index has been flat since February, suggesting that slow employment growth is likely to continue through the summer," said Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "Since there is little hope of acceleration in the pace of economic activity any time soon, these weak labor market conditions are likely to persist for the coming months."

June's drop in the ETI was driven by negative contributions from four of the eight components. The declining indicators – beginning with the largest negative contributor – were Percentage of Firms with Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers, Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance and Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get."

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 "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)
Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers (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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