The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their monthly unemployment update today, and it brought a welcome bit of news — November saw only 11,000 workers lose their jobs, the lowest one-month job loss since the recession began:

The unemployment rate edged down to 10.0 percent in November, and nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged (-11,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. In the prior 3 months, payroll job losses had averaged 135,000 a month. In November, employment fell in construction, manufacturing, and information, while temporary help services and health care added jobs.

The figures for September and October were revised downwards, too, although losses in those months are still being measured in six figures.

Let’s take the positive side of this first: while 11,000 people going out of work is still worse than one person going back to work, it’s still a much, much lower loss figure than we’ve seen at any point during this Great Recession. You have to keep in mind the depth of the hole our economy was dug into. Here’s a chart I made showing the monthly increase in unemployment going back to January 2008:

11,000 jobs lost is still 11,000 too many. But look at the precipitous downhill slide we were on through 2008 — a slide that only started turning around in January of this year.

I wonder what could have happened that month that would have stemmed that slide?

Oh, that.

I bring this up not just to be snarky (although that’s always fun), but because there’s been an increasing clamor from the right that somehow President Barack Obama’s policies, and Congressional efforts like the stimulus package, have been driving unemployment up. The chart above shows just how silly that line of thinking is. President Obama was sworn in in January; the stimulus was signed into law in February. You can’t look at the line on that chart and tell me with a straight face that it was moving in a better direction before January-February 2009 than it has been since then.

Now, that’s not to say that we are out of the woods yet. Like I said above, even with the big reductions in job losses that have been effected since the beginning of this year, we still don’t have an economy that’s creating new jobs, just one that’s losing them less quickly. And there are some worrying figures hidden underneath that overall employment statistic. For instance, the ranks of the long-term unemployed continued to swell in November:

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by 2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.

This points to one reason why I think Paul Krugman is right that we shouldn’t let the improvement in the overall employment picture lull us into complacency — even if job losses stabilize, the Great Recession has created a huge new class of Americans who have been out of work for half a year or more. Putting those people back to work will require creating millions of new jobs to replace the millions that have been lost. If we don’t do that — if we decide to be penny wise and pound foolish and curtail recovery efforts now — we risk establishing a much higher level of unemployment as the “new normal”, with the jobs that some large chunk of those six million people used to have simply never coming back.

That outcome leads to the scenario that Elizabeth Warren warned about on Huffington Post yesterday — an America without a middle class:

Today, one in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Families have survived the ups and downs of economic booms and busts for a long time, but the fall-behind during the busts has gotten worse while the surge-ahead during the booms has stalled out.

That’s not the American Dream. And that’s why just slowing the job losses to a trickle isn’t the end of our work; it’s the beginning.