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Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index Plummets to Lowest Level in Almost Four Decades

An index measuring employment trends in the U.S. plummeted in April to a 37-year low as the job market deteriorated rapidly amid the coronavirus pandemic, the Conference Board said in a report Monday.

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index stood at 43.43 in April, compared with a downwardly revised figure of 57.87 in March. The reading is the lowest since April 1983, when the index was 43.29.

The index is down 60.2% from a year ago, the report said.

“A decline in jobs of this magnitude is unprecedented. The principal objective of the economy going forward is to accommodate the delicate balance of getting people back to work while minimizing the spread of the virus,” Gad Levanon, head of The Conference Board Labor Markets Institute, said in prepared remarks.

Millions of workers in businesses that were shut down will return to work over the coming months as states start to reopen their economies, but for many companies massive layoffs will continue in the coming months as they try to adjust to lost revenue with cost cuts, Mr. Levanon said.

Even if in May and June the number of workers returning to work is larger than the number being furloughed or laid off, “the labor market may still be in worse condition than it was at the peak of the Great Recession,” he said.

The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor market related indicators. All of them declined in April.

From the largest negative contributor to the smallest, these were: the ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, the number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, the percentage of respondents who say they find “jobs hard to get,” initial claims for unemployment insurance, industrial production, job openings, real manufacturing and trade sales, and the percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now.
Source: Dow Jones

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