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Governor Asks IL Businesses to Push for Pension and Medicaid Changes
From WUIS: Governor Pat Quinn is urging business owners to support his plans for overhauling state employee pensions and Medicaid. He spoke to a gathering of Illinois manufacturers and retailers in Springfield…Mark Denzler is vice president of the Illinois Manufacturer’s Association. “Well Illinois businesses want to operate in state that’s not bankrupt, that’s not on the edge of a fiscal abyss. So it’s important that the state of Illinois, the Governor and General Assembly address pensions and Medicaid which are spiraling out of control, so we applaud the Governor’s message for fiscal restraint, for reforming pensions and Medicaid, and we think it’s a movement in the right direction.” It’s unclear if lawmakers will keep going in that direction, however. TO READ MORE …
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Thursday
Feb092012

Conference Board: Employment Trend Index™ Increases in January  

DateThursday, February 9, 2012 at 12:22PM

The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) increased 0.73 percent in January to 105.81, from the revised figure of 105.04 in December. The January figure is also up 5.9 percent from the same month a year ago.

“The Employment Trends Index has been improving rapidly for four straight months, suggesting somewhat more robust job growth is likely to continue in this quarter,” says Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. “Beyond that we still remain cautious. We expect sluggish growth in economic activity in the first half of 2012 and therefore we do not foresee the strengthening of the labor market to be sustained in the second quarter of 2012.”

This month’s strength in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from four of the eight components. The improving indicators include Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry, Industrial Production, and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales. Improvement of last two components is based on statistical imputation.

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)

• 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 is a global, independent business membership and research association working in the public interest. For more information, visit http://www.conference-board.org.

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