Still No Jobs Report, But The Labor Market Doesn’t Look Good

Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about rules and norms. We can assume that he has seen the report, and based on its contents, Trump decided not to make it public.

By Dean Baker, Center For Economic And Policy Research

Donald Trump refuses to release the September jobs report. While the ostensible reason is the government shutdown that began October 1, two days before the scheduled release date, Trump could decide the release was an essential government function.

Also, according to Erica Goshen, a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the release was almost certainly prepared and ready to go by the first. Ordinarily, the president would not see the report until the afternoon before the release, but Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about rules and norms. We can assume that he has seen the report, and based on its contents, Trump decided not to make it public.

Anyhow, without actually seeing the report, all we can do is speculate. But there is some labor market data coming from private sources, which do give us information.

A friend called my attention to the job listing firm Indeed’s index of job postings. It shows continuing weakening of the labor market.

While all of us have been saying that we are in a low hiring, low firing labor market, where there is little job turnover, that has been true since the spring. What is striking in this graph is that the listing index continues to move downward. The index for the beginning of October was more than 5 percent below the index number at the start of April.

This means that, in order not to have a deterioration in the labor market, we would also have to see a decline in the number of people quitting or being fired of 5 percent. That could be the case; there was a sharp fall in the number of separations BLS reported for August in the JOLTS data. (We don’t have September data.)

However, the monthly data are highly erratic. The average for the last three months (June, July, August) was less than 0.5 percent below the average for the prior three months (March, April, May). This would indicate little change in the firing/quit story to match the decline in hiring shown by the Indeed index.

We should be cautious about making too much of this index. It is useful, but it is just one piece of data, but we have to try to use what is available until Trump chooses to share the government data with the rest of us.