Thanks to direct government investments under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), 960,494 jobs were created or saved. However, this doesn't change the fact that the economic effects of ARRA dollars will start to diminish beginning in the middle of 2010--well before Americans hit the hardest by the economic crisis will be fully out of the woods.

The Center for American Progress has proposed a set of three main policy steps they believe Congress and Obama could take to contribute substantially to putting our nation's labor market back on track. To accompany their proposals, CAP has created this informative video explaining why unemployment in the U.S. is still so high--and how a more aggressive jobs plan (like SEIU's) could be enacted to tunnel us out of the recession.

Read about SEIU's 9-point jobs plan here.