533,000 Jobs Lost in November

Unemployment Rate Jumps

The unemployment rate also shot up from 6.5 percent to 6.7 percent, the Labor Department said. It is the highest unemployment rate the country has seen since October 1993.

As the recession deepens and consumers and companies cut back spending, American businesses are slashing jobs to try to remain profitable.

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The jobs losses have been widespread with just about every industry affected. Large layoffs have been seen in manufacturing, construction, financial firms, retailers, travel and leisure and hospitality. Health care remains one of the few fields where jobs are holding their own, if not growing. Education and government jobs were also bight spots in an otherwise dismal report.

In real terms, unemployment rates this high mean that more than 10 million of us are looking for work but simply cannot find it. That's an additional 2.7 million people who have been actively looking for jobs but have not found them since the beginning of the recession.

The last three months, coinciding with the ongoing world financial crisis, have been dismal -- the average monthly jobs loss was 419,000 -- as American companies have faced a perfect storm of economic collapse.

The consumers they sell to have tightened their pocketbooks. Banks and commercial lending markets they rely on to stock the shelves and pay their employees have not been functioning. They have no choice but to cut back -- big and fast.

As bad as it is now, economists fear, with credit at a standstill and consumers barely spending, that worse is on the way.

"You could easily envision unemployment continuing to rise all through 2009 into 2010," said Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. "It could cross 10 percent which would really be a disaster for tens of millions of people and that's a plausible scenario."