Due to the government shutdown, about all we can really expect from the Labor Department is a report on weekly jobless claims. Yes, the national unemployment and payrolls report likely will not be released this Friday. So now investors and traders will have to focus on the national payrolls report from ADP as “the big employment number” this week.

The ADP National Employment Report projects that the private sector added about 166,000 jobs in the month of September. Bloomberg was calling for 180,000 and Dow Jones was calling for 178,000 as the consensus readings. The prior report from August was revised down from 176,000 to 159,000.

ADP signaled that goods-producing employment rose by 19,000 jobs in September, construction payrolls added 16,000 jobs and manufacturing payrolls increased by only 1,000. As the United States has a services-based economy, it should be of little surprise that service-providing industries added 147,000 jobs in September, but this was down from 152,000 in August. Service jobs added were as follows:

• Trade/transportation/utilities added the most jobs with 54,000 over the month.
• Professional/business services employment rose by 27,000.
• Financial activities actually lost 4,000 jobs.

The quote given was by Mark Zandi, who is chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, who said:

The job market appears to have softened in recent months. Fiscal austerity has begun to take a toll on job creation. The run-up in interest rates may also be doing some damage to jobs in the financial services industry. While job growth has slowed, there remains a general resilience in the market. Job creation continues to be consistent with a slowly declining unemployment rate.

With no Employment Situation Report from the Labor Department on Friday, this ADP report is now about the most important jobs report for this week. Unfortunately, this report does not have any great news.

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