WASHINGTON — The government will publish its final snapshot four days before election day recruitment and unemployment in the United States after a presidential race in which voters’ perception of the economy has played a central role.
Still, Friday’s report will contain some of the most distorted monthly employment numbers in years, with job growth temporarily slowed in October by hurricanes and workers’ strikes.
So just as voters, politicians and Federal Reserve officials look for a clear understanding of the economy, they will instead get an unclear view. The report comes as Donald Trump’s Republican allies, who have sought to cast doubt on the health of the economy, have tried undermines trust in the credibility of the monthly jobs reports.
Trump and his supporters have repeatedly attacked the Biden-Harris administration over the inflation spike that peaked two years ago before steadily cooling. Despite healthy job growth, few layoffs and low unemployment, Trump has also accused the United States of being a “failing nation” and vowed that his plan to impose sweeping tariffs on all imported goods would restore millions of manufacturing jobs.
Typically, monthly jobs data helps clarify how the economy is doing. But economists estimate that Hurricanes Helene and Milton, combined with the fallout from the ongoing strike by Boeing machinists, will have reduced the number of jobs by a significant amount over the past month: about 60,000 to 100,000 jobs, most of which are only temporary .
All told, economists estimate that Friday’s report will show that only 120,000 jobs were added in October, according to data provider FactSet. That’s a decent number, although less than half of September’s unexpectedly robust gain of 254,000. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a low level of 4.1%.
Considering the impact of the hurricanes and strikes, these numbers would still indicate a solid labor market, which has shown surprising durability, supported by healthy consumer spending, despite the Fed’s high interest rates.
“This really is an incredibly resilient economy,” said Jane Oates, a former Labor Department official during the Obama administration. “People spend money. That’s what keeps this economy going.”
However, there may be other effects that are more difficult for the government to measure. For example, the Labor Department has said it believes the strike by Boeing machinists, along with a smaller strike by some hotel workers, reduced job growth by 41,000 in October. But some Boeing suppliers may also have lost jobs as the strike reduced their sales. It is not clear how much impact these job losses might have had on October’s employment figures.
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) before their job is considered lost in government data. While many workers in North Carolina were likely out of work for that long, it’s not clear that workers in Florida, where there is more experience with hurricanes, would have missed that 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 hit. And in some states, people will be hired as part of the cleanup and rebuilding 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 rates by a quarter point after an excessive rate hike half point reduction in September.
If the jobs report shows that hiring remained healthy in October, barring the impact of the hurricanes and the strike, Republican political figures could once again question its credibility. When the administration reported last month that hiring had unexpectedly increased in September, Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, leveled the baseless charge that the report was “fake.”
Yet no mainstream economist shares such skepticism. Other indicators – such as the number of people seeking unemployment benefits, data collected mainly by states – also point to a still robust labor market.
“I’m shocked at the extent to which politicians have made this argument,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the jobs report, “is the most transparent government agency in the world,” she said.
Trump and other critics have seized on the revisions often made to the administration’s initial estimates as evidence for their false claim that the Biden-Harris administration manipulated the data. In August, the BLS said it expected to lower its estimate of total U.S. jobs as of March last year by 818,000, or about 0.5% of the total. During the presidential debate in September, Trump claimed the revision reflected “fraud” in the employment data. But under its own administration, the BLS revised the job count decreased by 514,000 in 2019.
Erica Groshen, a senior economic advisor at Cornell University and former commissioner of the BLS, explained that such revisions “are not a bug; 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.
The way it does that is by releasing early data based on surveys of tens of thousands of companies. Revisions are then made based on late-arriving data from more companies and on actual job counts from unemployment benefits agencies.
Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance, has often tried to undermine the positive workforce data by claiming that all the jobs created in the past year have gone to immigrants.
That claim rests on the fact that the number of “foreign-born” people with jobs, as BLS calls them, increased by 1.2 million in September from a year earlier, while the number of native-born workers with jobs with about 800,000 has fallen.
Yet the “foreign-born” category includes people who have been in the United States for years, including since childhood, and who are now citizens, as well as recent immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized.
More importantly, native Americans have been retiring en masse, one reason why so many employers have often struggled to fill jobs. As the massive baby boom generation ages, the share of Americans age 65 and older has risen to 17.3%, up from just 13.1% in 2010. according to Census Bureau data.
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%.