Job market shows improvement

February 6, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The job market is lurching toward improvement. It just has a long way to go.

The outlook for jobs became a bit less bleak Friday when the government released January’s unemployment rate showing an unexpected decline from 10 percent to 9.7 percent. It was the first drop in seven months.

Still, the government now estimates 8.4 million jobs vanished in the Great Recession. And economists say the nation will be lucky to get back 1.5 million of them this year. They also warn it will take until the middle of the decade for the job market to return to normal.

The economy is growing, and normally job creation would be strengthening. But the job market is weighed down by employers who remain slow to hire because consumers are not spending enough. Companies worry about their prospects once government-stimulus aid fades. They also fret about possibly higher costs related to taxes or health-care measures from Congress and statehouses.

The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level since August because a Labor Department survey of households found a sharp rise in the number of Americans with jobs. The survey found that 541,000 more Americans had jobs last month. But those gains resulted from seasonal adjustments to the data. Without those adjustments, the data show fewer people had jobs last month.