WASHINGTON — The nation lost a staggering 533,000 jobs in November for the worst monthly decline in 34 years, putting new pressure on federal lawmakers and President-elect Barack Obama to move aggressively to contain the widening economic crisis.
The unexpectedly high job losses, coupled with the threat of an auto industry collapse and escalating home foreclosures, point toward a much deeper recession than many economists had anticipated.
"With the loss of over a half-million jobs just last month, the U.S. job market is now shedding jobs at a truly alarming rate, a rate that is measurably worse than past recessions," said Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute who has been named an advisor to incoming Vice President Joe Biden.
"Policymakers need to recognize this as an emergency at the scale of any we've seen in recent years," he said.
Adding to the grim news, the Labor Department said Friday that job losses in the previous two months were much worse than originally estimated: 403,000 in September and 320,000 in October. That means that more than 1.25 million jobs vanished in just the last three months.
The darkening employment picture is making it harder for people like Jason Webber, 40, of Hollywood to find work.
Webber, a sculptor whose last job was as a sales associate at Kmart, said he had sent out 60 job applications and gone on 18 interviews just in the last three weeks, to no avail.
His girlfriend, Elizabeth Fields, 25, is expecting the couple's second child in 10 weeks, and Webber said he was increasingly anxious that he wouldn't have a steady income to support his family.
"It's just hellish," Webber said. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm running out of time. I'm probably not going to have a job when the baby's born, but that's just not an option."
Harry Holzer, a labor economist at Georgetown University, warned that a vicious cycle of job losses and foreclosures appeared to be picking up steam. A trade group reported Friday that a record 1 in 10 U.S. homeowners were either late on their mortgage payments or in foreclosure at the end of September.
"You're at that point in the business cycle where declines feed on themselves," Holzer said. "People who lose their jobs are going to have less money to make their housing payments, so that could increase foreclosures. They are also going to buy less, and declining consumer purchases are going to cause more job cuts."
