The US Department of Labor headquarters in Washington, DC, US, which houses the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The October jobs report will omit the month's unemployment rate, the White House said Thursday, leaving a big blank that could make it harder for policymakers and businesses to assess the state of the current labor market.
With the government laboring to reopen, a string of postponed economic data releases is expected in the coming weeks, including the September and October jobs reports. The former is poised to be released quickly since most of the necessary data was already collected.
The October data was originally scheduled for release on Nov. 7. But it didn't occur, since most employees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics were furloughed and unable to carry out their data-collecting work. The omission of jobless data further renders decision-making trickier across the U.S. economy. That includes the Federal Reserve, which is grappling with proceeding on a third interest rate cut in December.
"The household survey wasn’t conducted in October, so we’re going to get half the employment report,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said in a Fox News interview. “We’ll get the jobs part, but we won’t get the unemployment rate, and that’ll just be for one month.”
In a separate gaggle with reporters on Thursday morning, Hassett added: "We will never know what the unemployment rate was in October."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It's the agency responsible for producing the monthly jobs and inflation reports.
The monthly jobs report hinges on two components: One survey goes out to employers to gather information about the number of workers on their payrolls. Another is sent to 60,000 households to collect data on the unemployment rate by surveying people about their employment status. Usually, the BLS sends and gathers those surveys during the second week of the month, so it's likely gearing up to issue them in short order.
"We didn't do that for October. So what is BLS going to do?," Erica Groshen, who served as BLS chief under President Barack Obama, told Quartz. "If you start to ask people what everybody was doing six weeks ago, the quality of that information is going to go down — and you would be running this household survey at the same time as you're running it for November."
Should the BLS go ahead and release a jobs report without an unemployment rate, it would break with prior data releases. "The BLS has never put out an employment situation that was missing one of its legs," Groshen said. She emphasized she didn't intend to be critical of the agency's decisions.
In prior shutdowns such as one in 2013, the BLS had to delay a litany of releases and response rates tended to be lower in the reopening stages. The 2013 shutdown also ended a week after the usual BLS schedule of issuing surveys, so it wasn't very difficult for the agency to catch up. This time, it would have to send both surveys to households and businesses to collect October data nearly a month late.
Experts warn it may take more time for BLS to gather and schedule data releases this time since it has lost 25% of its staff to federal layoffs since the start of the year. In addition, a quarter of its leadership slots are vacant. Without any delays, the November jobs report will be published on the morning of Dec. 5.
