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On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy shed just 11,000 jobs in November. The reduction in payroll employment was the lowest since the start of the current recession in December 2007. Since that time, the number of job losses has continually fallen steadily by hundreds of thousands for months on end until recently. On Thursday, President Barack Obama hosted a jobs summit at the White House on the eve of the latest government jobs report, and then followed the summit on Friday with a speech at Allenstown, Pennsylvania where he hailed the findings of the report as “another hopeful sign.” But Obama also cautioned that much work still needed to be done in getting unemployed Americans back to work. Although the number of jobs lost in November was lower than many economists had predicted, hiring has not yet significantly picked up. Both the official unemployment rate of 10.2% and the 17.2% so-called underemployment rate decreased only by fractions of a percentage from the previous month. Turning to the future, in what has been the greatest jobs crisis since the Great Depression, the U.S. economy would have to add nearly 600,000 jobs per month for the next two years just to return to pre-recession unemployment rates. With such a daunting task ahead, the Economic Policy Institute has laid out a five-point plan to put 4.6 million Americans back to work in one year.

GUEST: Heidi Shierholz, Economist with Economic Policy Institute

For more information, visit www.epi.org/