US jobs market cools, private numbers show

Second straight US jobs report cancelled

- BEN CASSELMAN

A job fair in Chicago last month. Historically, when unemployment has begun to rise, it has done so quickly.

Job growth has remained weak this fall, but despite a series of high-profile layoffs at major corporations, the labour market has not taken a sharp turn for the worse. Probably.

With the federal government still shut down, the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not release its scheduled monthly jobs report on Friday, the second missed report in a row. Economists and policymakers haven't had an official read on the state of the labour market since August — the longest such data blackout on record.

They aren't flying entirely blind. State governments have continued to publish weekly data on applications for unemployment benefits, and a variety of private companies release figures on job openings, hiring, wages and other topics based on surveys and data from their customers.

Those sources don’t tell an entirely consistent story. ADP, a payroll processing firm, reported that employment at private companies fell in September but rebounded modestly in October. An alternative measure from Revelio Labs, a labour market data firm, showed the opposite. (Revelio’s measure includes government and private-sector jobs.) Data from LinkedIn, Bank of America and other sources paint a similarly mixed picture.

But, taken together, the available data suggest that the labour market has not changed drastically since the summer. Employers are not adding many jobs but have avoided resorting to widespread layoffs — a “lowhire, low-fire” limbo that has kept the unemployment rate low but made it difficult for people without jobs to find them.

“Employers have been in a holding pattern with regards to hiring; workers have been in a holding pattern in terms of switching jobs,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “In some ways it just seems like we continue to tread water.”