The Conference Board's ETI for September was up 0.3% from the revised August number, and now stands at 88.5. In a release, senior economist Gad Levanson says that although the BLS employment numbers were "certainly disappointing," the ETI "suggests that the trend of declining job losses will continue. But the road to recovery is definitely going to be bumpy and may last unusually long, given the depth of the recession we have experienced."

Four of the eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the ETI showed improvement: initial claims for unemployment insurance, percentage of firms with positions not able to fill right now, industrial production and real manufacturing and trade sales. Other indicators are the percentage of respondents who say they find jobs hard to get, as measured in a Conference Board survey; and three indicators from the BLS: number of employees hired by the temporary-help industry, part-time workers for economic reasons and job openings.

Two weeks earlier, the Conference Board reported another monthly increase in its Leading Economic Index, with August showing an improvement on July. The LEI had declined for 20 consecutive months since July 2007 before starting to edge upward again in April of this year.