The Conference Board

History

The organization was founded in 1916 as the National Industrial Conference Board (NICB). At the time, tensions between labor and management in the United States were seen as potentially explosive in the wake of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 and the Ludlow Massacre in 1914. In 1915 presidents of twelve major corporations in the United States and six leading industry associations met in Yama, New York to formulate the business community’s response to continued labor unrest and growing public criticism.

After additional crisis meetings, the National Industrial Conference Board was officially founded May 5, 1916, at the Hotel Gramatan in Bronxville, New York. Although many of the organizations’ founders—including former AT&T president Frederick P. Fish and General Electric executive Magnus W. Alexander, its first president—had supported the open-shop movement, by 1916 they regarded national unions such as the American Federation of Labor as permanent fixtures of the American economy, and urged negotiation and concord.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the National War Labor Board formed by President Woodrow Wilson asked the NICB to formulate plans that would keep war industries running and strife-free. Its recommendations—based on cooperation between representatives of employers, employees, and government—were adopted in full. During and after the war, the NCIB conducted pioneering research into workers' compensation laws and the eight-hour workday, and established the U.S. Cost of Living Index. Though often mistrusted in its early years as an “employers union” funding studies against the labor movement, the non-profit NICB was also seen “as a spokesman for the so-called progressive wing of the business community [and] produced hundreds of research reports on economic and social issues facing the United States.”

The organization today remains funded by the contributions of members, often Fortune 500 companies. By the 1930s, however, it had already lost most of its character as an industry lobby. Virgil Jordan, a writer and economist who replaced Alexander as president on the latter’s death in 1932, established a Bureau of Economic Audit and Control to offer members and the public an independent source of studies on unemployment, pensions, healthcare, and related issues in the midst of the Great Depression, when many questioned the credibility of the government’s economic statistics. Unions soon joined the NICB alongside corporations for access to its research, conferences, and executive network.

The organization is now considered an unbiased “trusted source for statistics and trends, second only to perhaps the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics”. After World War II, The Conference Board—the shortened name adopted in 1970—expanded to non-U.S. members for the first time. Today, it has offices in Brussels, Beijing, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The Conference Board of Canada was spun off as an independent non-profit in 1981.

Economic indicators

The Conference Board publishes a number of regular indicators for United States and international economies that are widely tracked by investors and policy makers. They include:

The organization also releases regular global and regional growth outlooks and commentaries on economic news. In 2008, The Conference Board named Professor Bart van Ark of the University of Groningen as its first non-U.S. chief economist.

Products and services

In addition to research reports, The Conference Board organizes conferences, leadership events, and professional peer networks. It is a leading source of knowledge about corporate governance, corporate performance, business ethics, corporate security, human resources management and global corporate citizenship, grouped into four major practice areas:

The Conference Board also published a magazine of ideas and opinion, which was called Across the Board from 1976 to 2006 and The Conference Board Review until June 2014, when production ceased. In 2003, The Conference Board's Commission on Public Trust and Private Enterprise, which included 12 prominent leaders from business and other sectors of society, issued a wide-ranging series of recommendations to help restore public trust in companies, their leaders and the capital markets. Many of these recommendations have been adopted. In 2009, The Conference Board convened a task force on executive compensation.

In February 2012, The Conference Board launched The Demand Institute in collaboration with Nielsen. The Demand Institute is a non-profit, non-advocacy organization focused on helping business and government leaders understand how consumer demand is evolving and shifting around the world.

In January 2015, the Committee for Economic Development (CED) merged with The Conference Board, given the many synergies between the two organizations. Both are non-partisan, non-lobbying, and have members comprised mainly from the business community. CED's trusted policy voice in the nation's capital of Washington, D.C. expands the reach of The Conference Board's research; The Conference Board's economic data further strengthens CED's policy solutions.