This should be a big week for jobs data, with reports on what’s happening with job openings and turnover, the unemployment rate, and wage growth. But we aren’t getting any of that, because of the government shutdown (which is now officially the longest on record.)

Instead, we're continuing to follow what’s happening in the labor market with the help of private data. Payroll processing firm ADP put out its monthly employment report Wednesday, which shows private companies added jobs in October, for the first time since July — about 42,000 of them.

Meanwhile, data from Indeed showed that as of the end of October, job openings were down to their lowest level since early 2021.

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 Pancotti, managing director of policy and advocacy at at the Groundwork Collaborative, said 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,” she said. “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, Pancotti said she’s not seeing a huge upward 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,” she said.

There are warning signs in the latest reports from ADP though, Pancotti said, for small businesses in particular.

“We see large contractions among those small companies, where we've lost 88,000 jobs since July, where large companies have added 151,000,” she said. “That, to me, is the most concerning thing coming out of ADP.”

Another concerning thing about this labor market is how hard it is to get a job if you don’t already have one, said Allison Shrivastava, an economist at Indeed Hiring Lab.

“And that's impacting people who have lost their job, and it's impacting people who are trying to enter the labor market for the first time. It’s definitely a precarious situation we're in,” she said.

Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, said surveys show people are anxious these days — even those who have jobs. 

“Employees feel very sour about the current job market,” he said.

With good reason. In a strong economy, the labor market might add a couple hundred thousand jobs a month. Lately?

“We're talking about only tens of thousands of jobs being added,” said Zhao. “And really, I think that the sluggish hiring we're seeing is the most important statistic for understanding the current malaise that the job market is in.”

Despite all that malaise, Guy Berger, a senior fellow at the Burning Glass Institute, said the market’s not terrible. But pressures are growing.

“The government shutdown is piling on top of all tariffs and everything else. And the question is, at some point, do these things break? At some point, does the very slow, gradual slide …turn out to be a precipitous fall?” he said.

And does the mediocre job growth we’re seeing now turn into job losses?