The Conference Board Employment Trends Index Increases in December

 The Conference Board Employment Trends Index (ETI), a monthly report gauging the aggregate of eight labor market indicators, increased in December. The index stands at 128.43, up from 127.83 in November. This represents a 7.5 percent gain in the ETI compared to a year ago.

“The Employment Trends Index increased in every single month of 2014, capping the year off with strong growth, 2.3 percent, in the final quarter,” said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. “The strengthening in the ETI suggests that rapid job growth is likely to continue throughout the first half of 2015. And as the labor market tightens further, acceleration in wage growth is soon to follow.”

December’s increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”, Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Industrial Production, Percentage of Firms with Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Number of Temporary Employees, and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales.

The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index include:

• Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find “Jobs Hard to Get”
• Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance
• Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now
• Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry
• Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers
• Job Openings
• Industrial Production
• Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales