What the job market is telling us without the usual data sources.

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

In Denver, I'm Amy Scott in for Kai Rizdahl. It's Wednesday, November 5th. Good to have you with us.

This should be a big week for jobs data with reports on job openings and turnover, the unemployment rate, and wage growth.

But of course, we aren't getting any of that because of the government shutdown,

which is now officially the longest on record. So instead, we're continuing to follow what's

happening in the labor market with the help of private data. Today, payroll processing firm

ADP put out its monthly employment report. It shows private companies added jobs

in October for the first time since July, about 42,000 of them. While the job search and hiring

platform, indeed, says job postings were down at the end of October, to their lowest level in nearly five years.

Marketplaces Samantha Fields has more on what we can read into all of this.

You never want to read too much into one month of data or one data source, on the labor market or anything, really.

But Elizabeth Pankati at the Groundwork Collaborative says you can get a decent sense of what's happening by looking at a bunch of different data points from different companies.

Taking all of that together, I see a very stalled labor market, but we are not seeing massive red flashing signs on the labor market yet.

Hiring continues to be slow, as it has been for months.

But despite all the high-profile

layoff announcements in the last couple of weeks, I am not, I would say, at this point,

seeing a huge trend upward in those layoffs.

I know the headlines feel like they are mounting, but in the data, this is still what we

consider to be within the typical bounds.

There are warning signs in the latest reports from ADP, though, Pankati says, for small businesses

in particular.

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