WASHINGTON (AP) — Four days before Election Day, the government will release its latest survey of hiring and unemployment in the United States after a presidential campaign in which voters’ perceptions of the economy played a central role.
Still, Friday’s report will contain some of the most distorted monthly employment numbers in years, as job growth was temporarily slowed in October by hurricanes and worker strikes.
Just as voters, politicians and Federal Reserve officials seek a clear assessment of the state of the economy, they are instead receiving an unclear assessment. The report comes at a time when Republican allies of Donald Trump have sought to sow doubt about the health of the economy and undermine confidence in the credibility of the monthly jobs reports.
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked the Biden-Harris administration over the rise in inflation, which peaked two years ago before steadily cooling. Despite hearty job growth, fewer layoffs and low unemployment, Trump has also claimed that the United States is a “failing nation” and he has vowed that his plan to impose sweeping tariffs on all imported goods would restore millions of manufacturing jobs .
Typically, monthly employment data helps clarify how the economy is doing. However, economists estimate that hurricanes Helene and Milton, combined with the impact of the ongoing strike by Boeing machinists last month, led to a significant drop in hiring – about 60,000 to 100,000 jobs, most of them fleeting.
Overall, economists expect Friday’s report to show that just 120,000 novel jobs were created in October, according to data provider FactSet. That’s a decent number, although less than half of the unexpectedly forceful enhance of 254,000 in September. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low 4.1%.
Taking into account the impact of the hurricanes and strikes, these numbers still point to a solid labor market that has shown surprising resilience in the face of the Fed’s high interest rates, supported by hearty consumer spending.
“This is a really incredibly resilient economy,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official during the Obama administration. “People are spending money. That’s what keeps this economy going.”
Still, there may be other impacts that are harder for the government to measure. The Labor Department, for example, has said it believes the Boeing machinists’ strike, along with a smaller strike by some hotel workers, reduced job growth by 41,000 in October. But some of Boeing’s suppliers may also have cut jobs as the strike hit their sales. It’s not clear what impact these job losses may have had on October’s employment numbers.
At the same time, the hurricane may have cost fewer jobs than economists expect. A worker would have to lose wages for an entire pay period – often two weeks – for their job to be considered lost in the government’s data. Although many workers in North Carolina were likely unemployed for so long, it’s not clear that employees in Florida, which has more experience with hurricanes, would have missed out on so much work, Oates said.
Economists at UBS noted that Orlando’s major theme parks – Walt Disney World, Sea World and Universal – were closed for only two days after Hurricane Milton. And in some states, people are being hired as part of the 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 cut its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, following an outsized half-percentage-point cut in September.
If the jobs report suggests that hiring remained stable in October without the impact of the hurricanes and strike, Republican politicians may again doubt its credibility. When the government reported last month that there had been an unexpected jump in hiring in September, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, made the baseless accusation that the report was “falsified.”
But no mainstream economist shares such skepticism. Other indicators – such as the number of applicants for unemployment benefit, which are mainly collected by the federal states – also point to a still solid labor market.
“I was appalled at the extent to which politicians made this argument,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the jobs report, “is the most transparent government agency in the world,” she said.
Trump and other critics are using the government’s constant revisions to its original estimates as evidence to support their false claims that the Biden-Harris administration manipulated the data. In August, the BLS said it expected to lower its estimate of total jobs in the United States from March of last year by 818,000, or about 0.5% of the total. During the presidential debate in September, Trump claimed that the revision reflected “fraud” in employment data. But under his own administration, the number of jobs revised by the BLS fell by 514,000 in 2019.
Erica Groshen, a senior economic adviser at Cornell University and a former commissioner of the BLS, said such revisions “are not a mistake; They are a feature of government data collection.
“BLS wants to release as much current information as possible, but also wants the information to be as accurate as possible,” Groshen said.
It does this by releasing early data based on surveys of tens of thousands of companies. Corrections are then made based on delayed data from other companies and actual employment figures determined by unemployment benefit agencies.
Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, has often tried to undermine positive hiring data by arguing that all the jobs created last year went to immigrants.
This claim is based on the fact that the number of “foreign-born” people with jobs, as BLS calls them, increased by 1.2 million in September compared to a year ago, while the number of native-born workers with jobs increased by 1.2 million in September compared to a year ago has fallen by around 800,000.
But the “foreign-born” category includes people who have been in the United States for years, including since childhood, and are now citizens, as well as novel immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized.
More importantly, U.S.-born Americans are retiring in droves, which is one reason so many employers have often struggled to fill positions. As the vast baby boom generation ages, the share of Americans ages 65 and older has increased from just 13.1% in 2010 to 17.3%, according to the Census Bureau.
And the unemployment rate for native-born Americans, at 3.8%, is actually lower than the unemployment rate for foreign-born workers at 4.2%.
