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Ahead of jobs day on Friday - how will the shutdown show up in the jobs report numbers? Honestly....it may be hard to detect...and may involve diving deep into BLS tables 1/
The shutdown is most likely to show up in the unemployment rate, but only if Federal and government contract workers identify themselves as unemployed.
In 2013, BLS did see an increase in Federal government workers who were unemployed, but also an increase in Federal government workers who "misidentified" themselves as employed, but absent from work. 
Keep in mind that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a specific definition of what counts as unemployed, and if workers do not answer the questions in the way that meets BLS’s definition, they would not be counted as unemployed.
So what happened to the headline unemployment rate during the October 2013 shutdown? it skyrocketed....from 7.2% to 7.2%.
BLS does publish unemployment rates just for government workers. But we need to be really careful in interpreting this data because it's not seasonally adjusted.
In the 2013 shutdown, the unemployment rate for government workers rose by 0.5 p.p. from Sep. to Oct. In recent years over that time period, that rate had fallen or functionally held steady.
The government worker unemployment rate has been 2.2% for the last two years in January, and it hasn't popped up more than 0.4 p.p. between Dec and Jan since 2011, so any numbers that look too different than that likely reflect the shutdown
On the payroll side, we are likely to see no impact of the shutdown. BLS is planning on counting workers who were furloughed but will be paid after the shutdown ends as employed, which means that the Federal government employment number is unlikely to be affected.
It seems unlikely that the private-sector numbers will be affected, and if they are it could be hard to tell. Any weak private-sector number could also be due to non-shutdown factors.
Private-sector employment growth bounces around quite a bit from month-to-month, which could make it hard to identify a specific shutdown effect. During its current streak of straight job growth, the number of jobs added each month has ranged from 16,000 to 356,000.
Overall, it is plausible that despite the stress that Federal government and contract workers just experienced, the headline jobs numbers Friday look standard.
Which is not to say that the shutdown did not have economic (or emotional) impacts on Americans, simply that the jobs report may not be the best data to capture those impacts.
