Employers slashed 598,000 more jobs in January as unemployment rate climbed to 7.6%.

Dan Arnall of the ABC News Business Unit tells us the bad news: the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the nation’s employers cut 598,000 workers from their payrolls during January, with significant downward revision to previous months. This is the worst month of jobs loss since December 1974 (-602K).

Since the jobs loss started in January 2008, the nation has seen more than 3.2 million jobs vanish into the black hole that is the current recession. The number is significantly worse than the best guess of economists (-524K) and marks the thirteenth consecutive month of negative jobs growth. 

The national unemployment rate – calculated in a separate and simultaneously released survey – rose significantly to at 7.6%. It’s the highest unemployment number since September 1992.

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