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From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
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As for the non-experts, NPR's John Ydstie has tips on how to understand the unemployment report beyond the headline numbers.
JOHN YDSTIE: Let's start by talking about the number of jobs gained or lost in the economy. The most recent employment report showed payrolls at U.S. businesses declining by just 11,000 jobs in November of last year. But Tom Nardone of the BLS says that doesn't mean just 11,000 people lost their jobs. Every month, he says, there's a huge churn of job losses and gains in the economy.
TOM NARDONE: You have millions of people who will lose or leave their jobs and millions of people who will gain jobs. And what gets reported as that headline number is just the net change of that.
YDSTIE: In fact, during the depth of the recession last January, when the employment report showed 741,000 jobs being lost, far more people than that were being hired.
NARDONE: In January, the worst month in terms of job loss, you had approximately 4.3 million hires that were going on in the economy.
YDSTIE: The unemployment rate - 10 percent in the most recent report - is also a less- than-definitive number. Different groups experience it differently. Blacks and Latinos have higher unemployment rates than whites. Teens have higher rates than older workers. And education makes a big difference, says Nardone.
NARDONE: For someone who has less than a high school diploma, their unemployment rate in November was 15 percent.
YDSTIE: By comparison, workers with a four-year college degree had an unemployment rate just under five percent. The headline unemployment rate also doesn't capture everyone who's lost a job, including people like Leslie Leigh Jividen of Akron, Ohio.
LESLIE LEIGH JIVIDEN: In my case, my layoff came in right after Christmas on December 29th.
YDSTIE: That was a year ago in 2008. Jividen, who had been employed by a lighting firm doing customer service and sales support, immediately began looking for another job.
LEIGH JIVIDEN: I'd never not worked. So, you know, my first instinct was, oh, I got to get something else. And then when I started looking, there just wasn't a lot out there.
YDSTIE: John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.