US October employment report will not include jobless rate, Hassett says

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Thursday the government would release the closely watched employment report for October, but without the jobless rate after a weeks-long federal government shutdown.

“The household survey wasn’t conducted in October, so we’re going to get half the employment report. We’ll get the jobs part, but we won’t get the unemployment rate. And that’ll just be for one month,” Hassett told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” program. “We probably … will never actually know for sure what the unemployment rate was in October.”

The 43-day government shutdown, the longest on record, caused the suspension of data collection, processing and publishing by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis.

The employment report is made up of two parts, the household survey from which the unemployment rate is derived and the establishment survey from which the nonfarm payroll count is calculated. The government surveys businesses and households for the employment report during the week that includes the 12th day of the month.

Economists had raised doubts about whether the October household survey portion of the report would be published as the data is collected from a random sample of households through interviews by field workers. 

Hassett also separately told reporters that the Council of Economic Advisers estimated the shutdown, which ended on Wednesday night, cost the economy about $15 billion per week. He estimated that translated to a subtraction of roughly 1.0 to 1.5 percentage points from annualized gross domestic product growth in the fourth quarter.

That is broadly in line with projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Hassett said the CEA estimated that 60,000 non-federal workers lost their jobs because of the ripple effects of the shutdown.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey and Lucia Mutikani, Editing by Franklin Paul and Andrea Ricci )