WASHINGTON - — WASHINGTON - -The government report Thursday that the nation's unemployment picture took an unexpectedly sharp turn for the worse after four straight months of moderately encouraging news was a sobering jolt to hopes that the economy might gradually be getting back on track.
The overall unemployment rate edged up just a notch, to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent in June, but the loss of 467,000 payroll jobs made it clear that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was far from over - at least for American workers.
And the size of the payroll loss was unexpected and reversed a four-month trend in which the size of the loss had been shrinking from the January peak of 741,000 jobs eliminated. The steady reduction in total jobs lost had raised hopes that an actual turnaround might be approaching.
No longer.
"The green shoots in the job market are hard to find," said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo, Calif., noting that cutbacks came across virtually every major industry.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the ranks of the unemployed have almost doubled to 14.7 million, and nonfarm employers have eliminated 6.5 million jobs.
Thursday's disappointing report dragged down stock markets around the world and gave Republican politicians fresh ammunition to criticize President Barack Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus program as ineffective in creating jobs.
In a measure of just how bad the employment situation has become, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington said the current economic decline has now erased the accumulated payroll growth of the last nine years.
"This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all the jobs growth from the previous business cycle," said EPI economist Heidi Shierholz.
Obama administration officials called for patience and vowed to do whatever was necessary to revive the economy and the labor market.
"We're going to keep doing everything we can to offset the pain and set this economy up for a robust expansion," said Jared Bernstein, chief economist and economic policy adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.
He said he saw one large positive sign in the Labor Department's monthly report: With the June numbers, the pace of job losses for the second quarter as a whole had fallen to 436,000 a month, on average, down from an average monthly contraction of 691,000 jobs in the first quarter.
