Today’s September employment report from the Labor Department has been postponed and rescheduled (maybe) for release down the road. The source of the delay, of course, is the ongoing shutdown of the federal government, courtesy of the budget battle in Congress. As a result, the official data remains a mystery at the moment, but that doesn’t stop us from considering the published numbers from other sources in an effort to develop some perspective on last month’s labor market profile. For instance, this week’s updates on the manufacturing and services sectors from the Institute for Supply Management offer useful proxies for inferring the hard data on payrolls. In particular, the employment components in the ISM Manufacturing and Non-Manufacturing reports are especially valuable.