Comprehensive Look at Labor Market not so Rosy.

Labor Market Conditions Index (February 2016)

– Level -2.4. Previous was -0.8.

This grates against the headline of last Friday’s BLS Employment Situation Report which showed +242,000 more jobs but a substantial drop in weekly income.  In order to get a more comprehensive look at the labor market the Fed produces this index. This index takes into account 19 labor market indicators: unemployment rate, labor force participation rate, part time for economic reasons, private payroll employment, government payroll employment, temporary help employment, average weekly hours (production), average weekly hours of persons at work, average hourly earnings (production), composite help-wanted index (Conference Board), hiring rate, transition rate from unemployment to employment, insured unemployment rate, job losers unemployed less than five weeks, quit rate, job leavers unemployed less than 5 weeks, jobs plentiful vs hard to get (Conference Board), hiring plans (NFIB) and jobs hard to fill (NFIB).