Shutdown has already delayed the jobs report. More critical reports could be held up

For economists who follow the job market, the first Friday of the month is usually like Christmas morning. That’s when the Labor Department ordinarily delivers its closely-watched report on jobs and unemployment.

But the first Friday of October brought nothing but a lump of coal, after the jobs report was postponed by the government shutdown.

Instead of sitting at her computer at 8:30 am, anxiously refreshing the screen to see the report, Allison Shrivastava spent an idle morning with nothing to do.

“I guess I’ll just slowly sip my coffee,” says Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed, the job search website. “Take the dog for an extra long walk.”

A lot is packed into the jobs report

The monthly jobs report is one of the government’s most closely-watched economic indicators. It can move financial markets when hiring is stronger — or weaker than expected. And it offers a wealth of detail about which industries are growing, or shrinking, and which workers are entering or leaving the job market.

“The jobs report is every labor economist’s favorite time of the month,” says Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor.

But not this month. Like other federal agencies, the Labor Department has furloughed the number crunchers who assemble the report, so it won’t be released until the government shutdown is resolved.

“This website is currently not being updated due to the suspension of Federal government services,” said a note on the site where the jobs report is ordinarily published. “Updates to the site will start again when the Federal government resumes operations.”

What economists had expected

Today’s report was expected to show that employers added about 50,000 jobs in September. That would be a pickup from the 22,000 jobs added the previous month, but a big slowdown compared to the 240,000 jobs added this time last year.

Some slowdown is inevitable, given the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants which is reducing the labor supply. But it’s not clear how much of the recent drop is the result of fewer jobs, or fewer available workers.

“I think everybody agrees that it’s not the kind of job growth we had a year ago,” says University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson, who was a White House economist in the Obama administration. “We can’t sustain job growth that’s that quick and get rid of a lot of our foreign-born workers.”

As job growth has slowed in recent months, many of the gains have been concentrated in health care — which tends to be insulated from the ups and downs of the broader economy.

Finding a job has become more difficult

Overall, there haven’t been a lot of layoffs, but it’s been a tough time for anyone trying to land a first job.

“Because there’s been so much uncertainty, I think everybody — employers and job-seekers alike — are kind of just holding their breath and trying to hold out for as long as they can to make kind of a decision,” says Indeed’s Shrivastava.

But anyone hoping for clues from the jobs report is out of luck, at least for now.

Until the shutdown is resolved, businesses and policymakers will have to make their best guesses about which way the economy is going. That would be hard enough if it were coasting on a steady course. But it’s more challenging at a moment of economic transition — like driving on a winding road on a foggy night, and having your headlights and your GPS conk out.

“We’re in a time where the economy is changing, and that makes data more valuable than it is in a regular time,” says Stevenson.

The critical inflation report could also be delayed

To be sure, there other sources of information about the labor market: Payroll processors report on how many direct deposits they make, and job search websites can tally their “help wanted” ads.

But economists agree there’s no substitute for the reach of the federal government’s number crunchers, even if the Trump administration has cut their staffing and fired the commissioner who used to oversee the jobs report.

“There’s no making up for a survey that captures tens of millions of employees,” Stevenson says. “There’s nothing that is close to that.”

In addition to postponing the jobs report, the government shutdown has halted collection of information for future reports, including the September inflation report which is due to be published in less than two weeks.

A government shutdown in 2013 that lasted 16 days delayed a wide variety of economic releases over the next two months.

Glassdoor’s Zhao is hoping for a faster resolution of this shutdown, so he can go back to happily unwrapping the jobs report on the first Friday of every month.

“We’ve got our fingers crossed,” he says.