But the encouraging signs, reported Friday by the Labor Department, were tempered by newly revised data that showed the country lost a staggering 8.4 million jobs in the past two years — about four times the net job losses in the deep recessionary period of the early 1980s and 1.2 million more than previously estimated.
The severe destruction of jobs since December 2007, when the latest recession officially began, means that it will take years for millions of distressed families — and the economy as a whole — to climb back from what is now being called the great recession.
"The crater we have is just incredible," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington.
Factoring in the growing U.S. population and new entrants to the job market, she estimated that employers would need to create, on net, more than 400,000 jobs a month over the next three years to fully recover the payrolls lost during the recession.
Despite the distance still to travel toward full recovery, the monthly report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates an economy that is improving gradually. The household survey found that 541,000 more people were employed in January compared with December, and there were 430,000 fewer people who said they were unemployed last month.
That brought the jobless rates down for men and women, young and middle-aged, high school and college graduates, though the unemployment rate for blacks overall bucked the trend and edged higher, to 16.5 percent.
Workers gain hoursAnother sign of continuing recovery was contained in the January data on the number of people who said they were working part time because their hours had been cut or they couldn't find full-time jobs. That number fell dramatically, to 8.3 million from a record 9.2 million.
(2 of 2)Real Estate Outlook: Strong Sales PredictedLaid-off executives have farther to fall
