NPR.

This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm Darym Woods.

And I'm Whalen Wong.

And it's what should be Jobs Friday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics was scheduled to give us the jobs numbers

for January, but due to the partial government shutdown, we're going to have to wait.

We still have some jobs numbers. We have the Chicago Fed estimate of U.S. unemployment for January.

That rate is 4.4%. And it's an unemployment rate that is essentially unchanged from December.

We also have private sector estimates of how many jobs are added to the economy in January.

Ravallio Labs, which is a workforce analytics company, it estimated that the economy lost 13,000 jobs.

HR and payroll company ADP, though, estimated the US gained 22,000 jobs. HR and payroll company ADP, though, estimated the U.S. gained 22,000 jobs.

Now, you might be wondering, do those numbers really justify an air horn? About a year ago,

we were announcing numbers like 140,000, 260,000. That we were saying meant a pretty strong labor market.

Yeah, losing 13,000 jobs or gaining 22,000, that doesn't necessarily mean that the jobs market

is going down the drain.

Today on the show, we speak with somebody whose story sheds light on what's happening with

all these topsy-turvy jobs indicators.

And we learn about what economists call the break-even jobs number.

We'll explain after the break.

To better understand why lower jobs numbers aren't meaning spiking U.S. unemployment, we spoke to Guy Berger.

Guy is a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, which is a labor market think tank.

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