WASHINGTON — The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 10.2% in October, raising questions about the staying power of the budding economic recovery and confronting President Obama with a politically explosive new challenge.
Not since 1983, after a double-dip economic downturn had sent the auto, steel and housing industries plunging, has the jobless rate gone so high. And many economists predict that it will go higher still in coming months -- and remain high for most if not all of next year.
Some 15.7 million workers now have no jobs, the government said in releasing its monthly unemployment report, and an estimated 5 million more are working fewer hours and drawing smaller paychecks than they were before the country fell into the worst recession in a generation.
In an effort to blunt the effect of the dismal news, Obama made a point of signing legislation Friday that provides additional aid for the jobless and expands and extends tax credits for home buyers.
But few economists thought either measure would substantially change the worsening employment picture or solve the president's increasingly urgent political problem: how to spur the creation of more jobs -- and quickly.
Although most analysts had expected the unemployment rate to rise from September's 9.8%, the increase was larger than expected. And a separate count of the number of jobs on employer payrolls fell by 190,000 last month, a bigger drop than expected.
In California, where unemployment was 12.2% in September, the rate for October will be reported Nov. 20.
The higher U.S. jobless rate was particularly disturbing because it was not the result of a flood of new workers into the labor market, something that often occurs when the economy begins to climb out of a recession. Rather, the latest downturn reflects a continuing decline in the number of people with jobs.
"I'm more nervous about the staying power of the recovery after today's numbers," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. He said he now expected joblessness to stay in double digits throughout next year, climbing to as high as 11%.
That level of unemployment, stretching as it does over most of the country instead of being confined to one hard-hit region the way the Rust Belt was hit in the early 1980s, presents Obama and his Democratic colleagues in Congress with both economic and political challenges.
