Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gloomy-job-numbers-signal-new-woes-for-economy Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript U.S. employers cut 598,000 jobs in January, bringing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent, in another sign of the deepening recession. It was the worst one-month job loss since 1974. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JIM LEHRER: The recession wiped out jobs by the hundreds of thousands in January, and the unemployment rate topped 7.5 percent. The government released those numbers today, as the U.S. Senate struggled to bring the stimulus debate to an end.Ray Suarez has our lead story report. RAY SUAREZ: The last time a jobs report was this bad, Gerald Ford was in the White House and President Barack Obama was 13 years old. The 598,000 jobs lost in January are the most in a month since December of 1974.As of today, almost 12 million Americans are counted as out of work; 3.6 million of them have lost jobs since the recession began in 2007; and nearly 2 million of those jobs have disappeared just since November.Keith Hall heads the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tabulated January's findings. He laid out the numbers this morning.KEITH HALL, Commissioner, Bureau of Labor Statistics: The labor market continued to weaken dramatically. Job losses in January were large and widespread across the major industry sectors. Now, the past three months we've had job loss of over 500,000, nearly 600,000 job loss, so you have a pretty significant deepening and broadening of the deterioration in the labor market.BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: Members of the Senate are reading these same numbers this morning. RAY SUAREZ: A short time later at the White House, President Obama used the report to insist that Congress finish work on an economic stimulus plan. BARACK OBAMA: These numbers demand action. It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay or politics as usual while millions of Americans are being put out of work.Now is the time for Congress to act. It's time to pass an economic recovery and reinvestment plan to get our economy moving.This is not some abstract debate. It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those 600,000 jobs that were lost this month.