WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. job openings barely budged in October, coming in at 7.7 million with ongoing uncertainty over the direction of the American economy.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 7.67 million vacancies in October, close to September’s 7.66 million.

Job openings have come down steadily since peaking at a record 12.1 million in March 2022, when the economy was roaring back from COVID-19 lockdowns. The job market has cooled partly because of the lingering effect of the high interest rates the Federal Reserve engineered in 2022 and 2023 to combat an outburst of inflation.

Meanwhile, the 43-day federal shutdown has made a mess of the government’s economic statistics.

The October report on job openings came out a week late, and the September version was not published separately because federal data collectors were on furlough. Instead, September’s JOLTS numbers were folded into Tuesday’s report along with October’s. They showed a hefty increase in openings from 7.23 million in August.

The Labor Department will issue numbers for hiring and unemployment for November next Tuesday, 11 days later than originally scheduled. The department is not releasing an unemployment rate for October because it could not calculate the number during the shutdown. It will release some of the October jobs data — including the number of positions that employers created that month — along with the full November jobs report.

Forecasters surveyed by the data firm FactSet predict that employers added fewer than 38,000 jobs in November and that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.5% from September’s 4.4%. That would be low by historical standards, but the highest in nearly four years.