Why higher productivity doesn't equal wage growth

Programming supported by Minnesota Carlson and their first Tuesday speaker series at the University of Minnesota, featuring candid conversations with some of the biggest names in business. More at z.umn.edu/firsttuesday. Remember what happened to economic data the last time the government shut down? Yeah. That again. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Risdall. It is Monday today. This one is the February 2, if you can believe that. It is good as always to have you along, everybody. We're gonna give you the bureaucratic language first, then we're gonna do our best to tell you what it's going to mean. Due to the partial federal government shutdown, read the email that marketplace's Carla Javier got from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning, the BLS will suspend data collection, processing, and dissemination, end of quote. Sadly, for those of us whose job it is to know what is going on in this economy, especially at this low higher, low fire moment, what's going on in the labor market, that means we are not gonna get the December job openings and labor turnover survey that was supposed to come out tomorrow. JOLTS is what we call that. And, also, probably, we're not gonna get the biggie, the January unemployment report that was due on Friday. All of that said, though, and on the theory that we're gonna get the data eventually, Carla made some calls to see what people are gonna be looking for whenever. Not only will these data show what's been going on in the job market recently, they'll also update the understanding of the past year through a process called benchmark revisions, says Daniel Zhao at the job site Glassdoor. We might get a very different picture of 2025 in hindsight where the job market was actually much slower than we originally thought and thus much closer to stall speed. Whenever these jobs numbers are released, he'll be looking closely at health care. It's been the pillar of jobs growth over the last year or two years. And so any slowdown we see in the health care industry is concerning. The latest reads showed a labor market that overall is stagnant. Lara Ulrich at the Indeed hiring lab says she doesn't see anything in its internal data that makes her think there'll be big swings. I'm expecting to still see hires rates low, quits rates low. The layoff number, though, will be interesting because we have seen more, at least, media reports of layoffs, but not an increase really in unemployment claims. If the jobs report is delayed by a day or two, that wouldn't be a big deal, says Jesse Rothstein at the University of California, Berkeley. But if the shutdown drags on again and the data gets tangled up in it again, he says. It means that we're flying blind. We don't really have up to date information on how the labor market is doing at a time when we're …