The Conference Board has released its Employment Trends Index (ETI) for the month of May, and it confirms what TrimTabs and the Labor Department showed for May last week. That is strength that was slightly better than expected.
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The ETI rose to 118.58 in May, up from a downwardly revised 117.32 in April. While it is not a major jump, it is at least a 5.4% gain in the ETI from May of 2013.
Monday’s report signals solid job growth, with an improvement in all eight components in the first five months of 2014. And May’s increase in the ETI was shown to be driven by positive contributions from seven of its eight components.
Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board, said, “The need for employers to rapidly expand their payroll in light of strengthening economic activity is a major factor in the rapid decline in the unemployment rate.”
In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were as follows:
- Industrial Production
- Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance
- Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales
- Ratio of Involuntarily Part-Time to All Part-Time Workers
- Number of Temporary Employees
- Job Openings
- Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”
We would remind readers that most of this data is known going into the report. The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index each month include the following:
- Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get” (Conference Board)
- Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- 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 (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Ratio of Involuntarily Part-Time to All Part-Time Workers (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Job Openings (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- Industrial Production (Federal Reserve)
- Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (BEA)
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