According to plans posted to the Department of Labor website, if the federal government shuts down later this week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics would not release scheduled data — including the monthly jobs report that’s expected on Friday. It’s an important tool for understanding the labor market, from how much workers are earning to the unemployment rate.
Imagine the job market is a bowl of soup. You could probably figure out, just by looking, if it’s hot or cold, or what might be in it.
“But ultimately, probably the best way to figure out what kind of soup it is and how good it is is just to taste the soup,” said Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor.
He said the BLS jobs report is the data equivalent of tasting the job market soup: It’s a representative survey that’s comparable over time.
“We have this benchmark to be able to see, OK, well, during past recessions or in the run up to past recessions, what were the patterns like, and does that compare to what we’re seeing right now?” he said.
There are other reports, including data expected Wednesday from the payroll company ADP.
But Jesse Rothstein, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, said they aren’t substitutes for federal jobs data.
“They’re quite noisy. They miss large sectors of the economy, and it’s much harder for them to to track the the overall trend,” he said.
Rothstein was chief economist at the Department of Labor in 2010. He said the impact of any potential data delay depends: “If the numbers come out on Tuesday instead of Friday, that’s not a tragic event. But if this goes on for more than a few days, then it becomes a big problem,” he said.
That could include pushing back data collection for October.