U.S. government shutdown may depress January job growth

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Some 800,000 government workers missed their first paycheck on Friday following the partial shutdown which started on Dec. 22 as President Donald Trump demanded that the U.S. Congress give him $5.7 billion this year to help build a wall on the country’s border with Mexico.

The Labor Department, which has not been affected by the shutdown, surveys employers and households for its closely watched employment report, which includes nonfarm payrolls and the unemployment rate, during the week that includes the 12th of the month.

For this month, the pay period for most federal employees that includes the week of the 12th runs from Jan. 6 to Jan. 19. About 380,000 workers have been furloughed, while the rest are working without pay.

Unless the government reopens next week, furloughed workers will probably be counted as unemployed, as they would not have received a salary during the pay period survey.

“So, if the government remains closed past January 19, then furloughed federal workers will not receive pay during the survey week, meaning that we’d very likely get a big drop in the headline payrolls report, something on the order of perhaps 500,000 to 600,000,” said Omair Sharif, senior U.S. economist at Societe Generale in New York.

That could result in the first monthly decline in employment since September 2010 and snap a string of 99 consecutive months of jobs gains.

But if Congress decides to pay these workers retroactively as was the case following the October 2013 government shut down, they would be considered employed.

“You can look at the private sector payroll figure to bypass this distortion, but it’ll create some uncertainty and prevent us from getting a clean read on the labor market,” said Sharif.

The economy created 312,000 jobs in December, the most in 10 months. Trump likes to boast about the strong labor market as one of his crown achievements. The shutdown, which on Friday tied the record for the longest in the nation’s history, could also drive up the unemployment rate in January.