What to look for in the big jobs report heading this way
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What to look for in the big jobs report heading this way.

I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. We'll get the big hiring and unemployment reports for April in about an hour and a half. Among the forecasters for this, friend of this program, Diane Swank, chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm KPMG. Hey, Diane. Good morning. GDP had a lot of noise in it, gross domestic product earlier this week. I'm interested in who's getting jobs and at what rate. What do you think we'll see today?

Well, I think we're going to see something around $130,000. The underlying pattern, though, is that we're looking for things to weaken. And we're starting to see that in some of the news headlines as well as companies start to tighten their belt as they deal with the blow of the margin pressure from tariffs. We get two reports later today. One is they count up payrolls. But the other one is they go essentially house to house asking if people are employed or not.

That's not the entire month. There's a period in which they actually do the survey. How did that line up with the dramatic announcement that some of the tariffs would not happen as announced? Well,

Well, the week of the survey is the week of April 12th, and so we saw a lot of whiplash. We saw the initial tariffs announced on April 2nd and then a pause about a week later during this survey week. So there was a lot of turbulence in the headlines during this week of the survey. What's important is whoever was getting a paycheck

in that week will count as getting a new job or a net, but that even if you were laid off after that, you wouldn't count until May. Diane Swank, Chief Economist at KPMG, thank you for this. Thank you.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sent an open letter to President Trump arguing tariffs pose a, quote, significant risk to jobs and may soon do, quote, irreparable harm to many small businesses. The chamber, which lobbies for firms large and small, is urging the White House to lift tariffs on items it says can't be made in the U.S. and to automatically exempt small companies, marketplaces. Samantha Fields has more.

Nicola Perry has been running her British restaurant and shop Tea & Sympathy in New York City for more than 30 years. She imports almost everything. Baked beans, clotted cream, teas, teapots. We've already had lots of emails from purveyors saying the prices are going to go up because of the tariffs.

which means she'll have to raise prices for her customers. She plans on telling them why. Sorry, guys, but the terrace is costing us X amount, so we're sharing it out amongst everybody. Otherwise, we won't be here. In Brooklyn, Mitchell Spitzik is worried his shop, Little Things Toy Store, might not be there much longer. Almost everything he sells comes from China. Really?

We are seriously considering all options in terms of what we need to do to survive. Namely, trying to stock up on extra inventory that's already arrived in the U.S. to keep prices down and make sure he doesn't end up with empty shelves. He's applied for a home equity line of credit. If he gets it... I can start stocking up for the holidays, but if I don't get that loan, I won't have holiday merchandise, possibly. If he doesn't have enough, he's not sure the shop can survive.

I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace. Ireland today hit TikTok with a $600 million fine for violating EU privacy laws. Regulators say the platform illegally sent user data to China, where TikTok is based. Under U.S. law, TikTok is supposed to break away from Chinese control or get cut off. It's still operating under a temporary reprieve from the Trump administration.

The U.S. administration wants to make it easier to fire federal workers. Among the 50,000 layoffs that could follow, some who work at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an office that calculates economic data that business, investors, and the government rely upon, such as today's jobs report. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has that.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the monthly jobs report, the Consumer Price Index, the Producer Price Index, Economist Bread and Butter. These statistics help us understand which metro areas across the country are growing faster or are losing jobs.

Economist Jed Kolko was an undersecretary at the Commerce Department in the Biden administration. He's worried that the proposed rule could sweep economists at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, into a new job category, workers who can be fired at will without the usual appeals process. Kolko is worried that it could be harder for BLS economists worried about losing their jobs to deliver bad news. And that...

might cause them to face pressure to change a methodology or change the way numbers are presented in order to look more favorable to the administration. Erica Groschen, a former BLS commissioner now at Cornell, says, for example, if the statistics look bad for the Trump administration, BLS could discover some glitch in the way the numbers were calculated and say we have to withhold it until we're sure that the numbers are right. Groschen

Groschen says ultimately, people could lose faith in the quality of BLS data. I reached out to the BLS for comment on all of this, but didn't hear back by deadline. I did talk to Judge Glock at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank. He says these are valid concerns, but he thinks BLS economists would resist pressure to manipulate data, even if they could be fired more easily, because their professional reputations would be at risk.

If one of them manipulates data clearly, that person, even if they were rewarded internally, will likely have a tough time for the rest of their life finding a good position.

And Glock says even if a BLS economist in the new job category were fired, they would be replaced by a career civil servant, not a political appointee. The rule establishing the new fire-at-will job category isn't final yet. It's still in the middle of a comment period. Plus, federal worker unions and their supporters have filed lawsuits challenging the proposed rule.

I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. And the Justice Department is accusing some big health insurance companies of corrupting the semi-privatized part of Medicare, the government-funded health program for older and disabled people.

In a complaint, the government prosecutors allege the companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars in kickbacks to brokers to push patients into their Medicare Advantage plans. Among the accused, CVS Aetna, Humana, and Elebence Health, companies plan what they say is a vigorous defense. In Los Angeles, I'm David Brancaccio, and this is the Marketplace Morning Report from APM American Public Media.

Hannah Sanborn was a single mom with newborn twins struggling to find affordable childcare. Her best friend Briar Rossi was burned out at work and looking for a way out.

So they came up with a plan. I was like, look, your leave's coming up like two weeks. Like, I'll put in my two weeks. Wow. And like, we'll just start it. We'll just do it. I was just like, let's do it. We're getting you out of this situation. We're getting me out of this situation. You tell me how much your rate is and I will pay it every week.

I'm Rima Grace, and this week on This Is Uncomfortable, how Hannah and Briar went from colleagues to best friends to lifelines. Listen to This Is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.