NPR.
This is The Indicator from Planet Money.
I'm Darian Woods.
And I'm Waylon 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 US 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 were added to the economy in January.
Revello 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.
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.