The shutdown meant no jobs report. Here's what it would have said about the economy

If it just seems like the first Friday of the month wasn't the same without being able to pore through the Bureau of Labor Statistics' hotly watched monthly jobs report, don't worry. You probably didn't miss much.

While the BLS has gone dark with the shutdown in Washington, other reports outside the government data suggest the labor market just plodded along in September.

The Dow Jones consensus forecast was for growth of 51,000 in nonfarm payrolls with the unemployment rate holding steady at 4.3%.

High-frequency data that includes job postings, private payrolls and state-by-state figures for initial jobless claims indicate that while employment growth continues to be anemic, the labor market overall isn't capsizing, at least not anytime soon.

“We fight with the army we have at moments like this, where it's critically important that we're figuring out whether the economy is in a moment of transition,” Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee said in a CNBC interview Friday. “This is what we have, and thus far it still continues to point to a pretty stable labor market.”

The Chicago Fed is one of those organizations looking to provide alternates to BLS data that had come under harsh White House criticism prior to this week's shutdown.

Though the timing was coincidental, the central bank district in September unveiled its own dashboard of data measuring key labor market metrics including unemployment, the hiring rate and the layoff rate.

Bottom line: The unemployment rate held flat at 4.3%, though another hundredth of a point or two would have pushed it to 4.4% — the highest since October 2021 but still low by historical standards.

Other nongovernmental data showed similar trends: Conditions overall are softening, with job availability gradually shrinking.

But employers are still reluctant to part with workers given the lessons from the Covid pandemic, when a rash of layoffs in the early stages was followed by the monumental task of refilling those jobs. At one point, open positions outnumbered available workers by more than 2 to 1.

“A lot of the new entrants in the market, young workers, recent graduates, people who are already unemployed [are] having a hard time getting into the market,” said Cory Stahle, senior economist at job postings site Indeed, which itself provides an encompassing menu of labor market data. “Regardless of what the unemployment rate is, people taking longer to find jobs is a sign of some economic distress for some households.”