CNN 2010-02-18

How the heck do you miss nearly a million jobs during the recession? Boom, just vanished. Apparently 1 our experts did. Just minutes ago a new measure of just how bad the economy is, and it isn't good, folks.

CNN's Christine Romans in New York.

So how do you miss a number like that, Christine?

Because we always have revisions, and so there's always this tweaking of these numbers. So I'm going to tell you, Kyra, when you've had a labor 2 market in such utter distress 3 as ours, we haven't since the early 1980s.

That means it was just so bad and so ugly that they couldn't capture it accurately 4 over past months. And now they finally have a very good gauge 5 of just how bad it was. And so here is the overall bad picture.

In the recession we lost 8.4 million jobs. We thought it was something like 7.2, it's 8.4 million jobs. So what these numbers from the Labor Department today tell us it was much worse than we thought overall, but -- but, it has stabilized 6 in recent months, the past three months or so.

And the unemployment rate in January fell to 9.7 percent from 10 percent. We lost 20,000 jobs just in January. We thought maybe we would create some, but we didn't. We lost 20,000 jobs, and now you put this all in the big picture. You've got a really horrific two or three year period, but as the Labor Department points out, you've got in the past three or four months, a real stabilization 7 in how many jobs have been lost.

Let me show you just for January what was happening in the industry that you may work in. Construction lost another 75,000 jobs. This is a pick up. This shows you the construction industry is still kind of in trouble and is losing a lot more jobs.

Transportation warehousing lost 19,000 jobs. There were some gains in temporary workers. And as we've told you many, many times, Kyra, when you start to see companies tiptoeing in to hire temporary workers, it means they're starting to feel a little bit better.

So far that temporary help is not translating into full-time 8 help, though. We still want to see that.

Retail 9 jobs, 42,000 created. Health care, 15,000. No surprise there. Government jobs, 33,000. A couple of economists 10 this morning telling me they think census 11 hiring is the reason. And you're going to see more job creation like that in the months ahead.

So what does this mean overall? Well, I've been asking economists. We've been getting all these e-mails from economists. They're saying look, it means the labor market was abysmal 12 for the past couple of years. It means you might still not have a job and it's going to be still hard to get a job, but it is thawing 14. It is starting to thaw 13 out and those mass, mass layoffs 15 that we saw exactly a year ago, they seemed to have slowed or stopped.

So job creation, many economists say, is just around the corner, and that hang in there, because they think the jobs growth will come in sometime here in the early part of the year