The Labor Department is expected to provide at least a little clarity when it releases November numbers on hiring and unemployment Tuesday, 11 days late.
Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet expect that employers added an unimpressive 40,000 jobs last month and that unemployment stayed at 4.4%, unchanged from the last rate published – for September.
Hiring has clearly lost momentum, hobbled by uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs and the lingering effects of the high interest rates the Fed engineered in 2022 and 2023 to rein in an outburst of inflation.
Labor Department revisions in September showed that the economy created 911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported in the year that ended in March. That meant that employers added an average of just 71,000 new jobs a month over that period, not the 147,000 first reported. Since March, job creation has fallen farther — to an average 59,000 a month.
Because of the government shutdown, the Labor Department did not release its jobs reports for September, October and November on time.
It finally put out the September jobs report on Nov. 20, seven weeks late. It will publish some of the October data – including a count of the jobs created that month by businesses, nonprofits and government agencies – along with the November report Tuesday. But it will not release an unemployment rate for October because it could not calculate the number during the shutdown.
The October numbers are expected to show a big drop in U.S. government jobs, reflecting the delayed impact of billionaire Elon Musk’s purge of the federal workforce as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Analysts at Evercore ISI, a research outfit, noted in a commentary last week that about 150,000 federal workers agreed to take a buyout under pressure from DOGE – and that 100,000 likely left the government when the 2025 fiscal year ended on Sept. 30, pushing down October payrolls. The remaining 50,000 stayed on for the rest of the calendar year and their departures will likely show up in the January 2026 jobs report.
Posted by John3262005