Jobs data has see-sawed lately. What can we expect for October?

It’s another job market data week. ADP releases its private-sector payroll numbers Wednesday and Challenger Gray & Christmas puts out its job cuts report Thursday. There’s also the October jobs report and worker productivity data from the Labor Department.

The September jobs report wasn’t much to write home about, with an anemic 29,000 jobs added. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, which is still low by historic standards, while wage gains continued to disappoint.

Through spring and summer, the job market seemed on pretty solid footing, said David Royal at Thrivent Financial. But then? “A lot of the strength that we saw in July and August in employment got revised away in September. So all of a sudden the jobs picture looks a little more murky,” he said.

Part of the issue is that job creation has been pretty narrow. There’s been consistent growth in healthcare, but that’s driven by the aging population — not a strong economy, per se. And manufacturing and construction are holding up largely because of the AI boom.

“Data centers are driving a lot of the job growth, especially in engineering,” said Sneha Puri, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab.

Other than that, though, job openings are weak: That’s the “low hire” side of the equation. As a result, employees have little leverage to demand higher wages, said Nich Tremper at small-business payroll firm Gusto.

“Small business owners aren’t necessarily seeing that they have to compete on wages for talent,” he said.

Average hourly earnings are now growing at the slowest pace since before the pandemic. Puri said she sees this in job postings at Indeed.

“Year-over-year growth in advertised salaries is significantly lower than inflation. That is a cause for concern,” she said.

“Low hire” has another negative implication for employment, said Jasmine Escalera, career expert at MyPerfectResume.

“When companies aren’t bringing new employees into their organizations, that can make finding work much more challenging for people who are unemployed,” she said.

All in all, it makes for a grumpy worker cohort, said Glassdoor Chief Economist Daniel Zhao.

“Employee sentiment is quite poor. When we look at reviews on Glassdoor, the overwhelming theme that is coming from workers who are anxious is job security,” he said.

That’s a reflection of the other half of the phrase we keep using for this job-market: “low fire.”

“Crucially for workers, if we are in a low-hire job market, the cost of being fired is much higher. And we see that reflected in long-term unemployment trending upwards,” Zhao said.

Which is unusual, he said, and worrisome, when the economy is actually growing.