WASHINGTON (AP) — Four days before Election Day, the government will release its final snapshot Recruitment and unemployment Following a presidential race in the United States in which voters' perceptions of the economy have played a central role.
Yet Friday's report will include the most distorted monthly employment figures in years, with job growth temporarily halted in October. storm And the workers strike.
So just as voters, politicians and Federal Reserve officials are looking for clear information on the economy, they will get a mess instead. This report has come when Donald Trump's Republican allies are trying to cast doubt on the health of the economy. reduce self-confidence In the reliability of the monthly jobs report.
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked the Biden-Harris administration for surging inflation, which peaked two years ago before steadily declining. Despite good job growth, few layoffs and low unemployment, Trump has also charged that the United States is a “failed nation” and vowed that his plan to impose sweeping tariffs on all imported goods would destroy millions of manufacturing jobs. Will restore.
Generally, monthly jobs data helps clarify how the economy is doing. But economists estimate that Hurricanes Helene and Milton, combined with the impact of the ongoing strike by Boeing machinists, will reduce hiring by a significant number last month — about 60,000 to 100,000 jobs, most of them only temporarily.
All told, economists expected Friday's report to show only 120,000 jobs were added in October, according to data provider FactSet. That's a good number, though less than half of September's unexpectedly strong 254,000 gain. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low of 4.1%.
Once the impact of the hurricanes and strikes are considered, these figures would still point to a solid job market, which has shown surprising durability, boosted by healthy consumer spending in the face of the Fed's high interest rates.
“It's really an incredibly resilient economy,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official during the Obama administration. “People are spending. “That's what keeps this economy going.”
Yet there may be other impacts that the government will have a harder time measuring. For example, the Labor Department said it believes a strike by Boeing machinists as well as a small walkout by some hotel workers led to a 41,000 decline in job growth in October. But some of Boeing's suppliers may also lose jobs due to the decline in sales due to the strike. It's unclear how much impact job losses would have had on October's employment data.
Additionally, the storm may cause fewer jobs to be lost than economists expected. A worker must lose wages for an entire pay period – often two weeks – to be considered lost their job in government data. While many workers in North Carolina may have been out of work for so long, it's not clear why workers in Florida, which has more experience with hurricanes, may not have worked as much, Oates said.
UBS economists noted that Orlando had large amusement parks – Walt Disney World, SeaWorld and Universal – closed for only two days After the arrival of Hurricane Milton. And in some states, people will be put to work as part of cleanup and reconstruction efforts.
Friday's jobs report will be the last major snapshot of the economy before the Fed's next meeting on Nov. 7, two days after the election. Most economists expect the Fed to lower its benchmark rate by a quarter point after the massive rate cut Half point cut in September,
If the jobs report shows that hiring remained healthy in October, excluding the effects of the hurricane and strikes, Republican political figures may again question its credibility. Last month, when the government reported an unexpected increase in hiring in September, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, made baseless allegations that the report was “fake.”
Yet no mainstream economist shares such skepticism. Other indicators — like the number of people seeking unemployment benefits, data that is mostly compiled by states — also still point to a solid job market.
“I'm horrified by the extent to which politicians have made this argument,” said Julia Pollack, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the jobs report, is “the most transparent government agency on the planet,” he said.
Trump and other critics have often seized on the government's revisions to early estimates as evidence of their false claims that the Biden-Harris administration has manipulated the data. In August, the BLS said it expected to lower its estimate of total jobs in the United States by 818,000, or about 0.5% of the total, by last March. During the presidential debate in September, Trump insisted that the amendment reflected “fraud” in employment data. Yet under his own administration, the BLS revised up the job numbers. down from 514,000 in 2019,
Erica Groschen, a senior economic advisor at Cornell University and former commissioner of the BLS, said such revisions “are not a bug; They are a feature of government data-gathering.
“BLS wants to get the information out in as timely a manner as possible, but it also wants the information to be as accurate as possible,” Groshen said.
The way to do this is to release preliminary data based on surveys of thousands of businesses. Later revisions are made based on late data from more companies and actual job counts received from unemployment benefit agencies.
Trump's running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, has often tried to downplay the positive hiring data by arguing that all jobs created in the past year have gone to immigrants.
That claim is based on the fact that the number of “foreign-born” people with jobs, as the BLS refers to them, rose by 1.2 million in September from a year earlier, while the number of native-born workers with jobs fell by about 800,000. There was a decline.
Yet the “foreign-born” category includes those who have been in the United States for years, including childhood, and who are now citizens, as well as recent immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized.
More importantly, Native Americans are retiring in large numbers, which is one reason why so many employers often have difficulty filling jobs. With the aging of the giant baby boom generation, the proportion of Americans age 65 and older has increased to 17.3%, up from only 13.1% in 2010. According to Census Bureau data.
And the unemployment rate for native-born Americans, 3.8%, is actually lower than the unemployment rate for foreign-born workers, 4.2%.