Economists were already braced for bad news in this morning's December 2008 employment report from the Department of Labor, but the numbers released were even worse than expected:

• The economy lost 524,000 jobs in December.
• The number of jobs lost in October and November was revised upward by 150,000 jobs--November's job losses, previously reported as a 533,000 loss, were revised to show a cut of 584,000. October's losses were revised to 423,000 from a decline of 320,000.
• From September through December nearly 2 million jobs were lost (1.934 million)
• The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent, the highest level since January 1993.
• An alternative measure of unemployment, which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking for work, and people who are working part-time but want to work full-time, is at 13.5 percent.  (so, more than one in eight people are either unemployed or underemployed).
  

There were job losses in every single month in 2008, with December's job loss numbers bringing the yearly total to a whopping 2.6 million. That's the biggest annual loss since the World War II era, when the nation experienced a 2.75 million drop in 1945.

The largest number of job losses in December was in services-providing businesses, which shed 273,000 jobs. The dismal December 2008 job losses picture spans across every sector, with 149,000 jobs lost in manufacturing, 101,000 in construction, and 113,000 in professional and business services. The retail sector shed 67,000 jobs. The few areas of growth were in education and health care, which added 45,000 jobs in December, and government, which added 7,000 jobs.

More than 1.1 million Americans are out of work, and expectations now are that the unemployment rate will reach 9 percent or more. Compounding an already-bleak situation for these millions of unemployed Americans is that fewer than half currently receive unemployment benefits, either because they work part time or because outdated regulations don't define them as having been working recently.

In response the severity of the unemployment situation facing so many Americans, President-elect Barack Obama has is advocating for a major expansion of government-assisted health care insurance and unemployment benefits. The WSJ reported on Wednesday that Obama plans to offer states $7 billion as incentive to permanently change their unemployment-insurance laws to cover part-time workers. In his speech yesterday at George Mason University, Mr. Obama said that his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan would "immediately jump-start job creation and long-term growth."

SEIU's two million members couldn't agree more with the urgency reinforced Obama in his address that Congress must act now to address this crisis and relieve the pain for working families before a bad situation becomes dramatically worse. "If Congress needed just three weeks to pass a Wall Street bailout, then we should be able to count on our leaders to pass Main Street relief with as much urgency," said SEIU President Andy Stern.

A new state-by-state effort to ensure passage of the economic recovery package was launched by SEIU this week. More details about the Change That Works campaign efforts here.