With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation’s employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

The decline, the largest one-month loss since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

“We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s. “It is being driven down by a host of factors: falling home and stock prices, fewer work hours, smaller bonuses, less overtime and disappearing jobs.”

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“This is so quick and so sharp,” says Richard Yamarone, director of research at Argus Research. “We had some job loss the first seven or eight months of the year, but it was nothing like this.” He says declining stock values are leading firms to cut more than usual in December.

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Unemployed workers filled the third floor of the Employment Security Commission [in the Charleston, South Carolina area] on Wednesday morning. The mood was somber and businesslike.

One-hundred claims were processed Tuesday, more than double the number of claims handled the same time last year, said Chuck Rein, a commission staffer who advises veterans at the Lockwood Boulevard office.

Hal Wynn, a radiology technician with 35 years of experience, said he was recently laid off indefinitely from the Medical University of South Carolina. He would like to visit family in Missouri during the holidays but said he can’t afford it.

“This is the first time I’ve ever been laid off. It’s kind of a shock,” he said. Wynn, 58, said his gift-buying would be “kind of slim” because of his financial situation. His 14-year-old son lives with him.

Read it all from yesterday’s local paper here.

The history of past recessions suggests that President-elect Obama has set a difficult but not impossible target for economic recovery: 2.5 million more jobs within two years.

By announcing this specific goal, alongside a stimulus plan and a team of top economic officials, Mr. Obama signaled that he is focused squarely on the challenge of job losses and an erosion of economic confidence.

He plans to ramp up spending on everything from roads and schools to solar panels and investments in energy efficiency.

The task ahead is formidable.

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South Carolina looked like a pretty good choice to computer network engineer Chad Birnbaum. Armed with a degree from Michigan State University and solid industry credentials, he landed a job in the area that paid $60,000 and offered full benefits.

At 25, life was good.

Then, as the financial meltdown began to wind its way through the local economy, Birnbaum was laid off by Welded Tube Berkeley.

“Things are getting ugly. I’m in a world of hurt,” he said this week after filling out forms for jobless benefits at the Employment Security Commission office on Lockwood Boulevard.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

President-elect Barack Obama has instructed his economic team to develop a plan to create 2.5 million jobs over the next two years, suggesting that he intends to push a more expensive package to stimulate the economy than he has so far proposed.

Speaking during the Democrats’ weekly radio address, Obama said that his team would work out the details of the package in the coming weeks but that he expects to present it to Congress in January and to sign it into law soon after taking office.

It will be a two-year nationwide effort to jumpstart job creation in America and lay the foundation for a strong and growing economy, Obama said. “We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels,” as well as fuel-efficient cars.

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It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research ”” on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like ”” that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.

But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass ”” they bet on management and they lost.

The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.

In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.

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This recession will probably have its own social profile. In particular, it’s likely to produce a new social group: the formerly middle class. These are people who achieved middle-class status at the tail end of the long boom, and then lost it. To them, the gap between where they are and where they used to be will seem wide and daunting.

The phenomenon is noticeable in developing nations. Over the past decade, millions of people in these societies have climbed out of poverty. But the global recession is pushing them back down. Many seem furious with democracy and capitalism, which they believe led to their shattered dreams. It’s possible that the downturn will produce a profusion of Hugo Chávezes. It’s possible that the Obama administration will spend much of its time battling a global protest movement that doesn’t even exist yet.

In this country, there are also millions of people facing the psychological and social pressures of downward mobility.

In the months ahead, the members of the formerly middle class will suffer career reversals. Paco Underhill, the retailing expert, tells me that 20 percent of the mall storefronts could soon be empty. That fact alone means that thousands of service-economy workers will experience the self-doubt that goes with unemployment.

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Because the health plans currently on offer were devised early this year, long before the full magnitude of the financial market meltdown and global recession were evident, experts predict that benefit offerings a year from now during sign-up season could demand that employees dig even deeper into their own pockets.

“Many more big companies will be making dramatic changes in their health plans next year, as the effects of the economic crisis become clear,” said Helen Darling, the president of the National Business Group, a national association of large employers.

Heading into the current enrollment period, the number of workers and their families covered by high-deductible plans has been growing 20 to 30 percent a year, to about 12 million, said Steve Davis, managing editor of Inside Consumer-Directed Care, a trade newsletter. While not a small number, it did represent only about 7.5 percent of the 158 million people with employer-sponsored coverage.

More telling, perhaps, is the fact that of the 12 million people covered by high-deductible plans, fewer than one-quarter of them have a health savings account in which there is actually money, according to Mr. Davis. To help offset their high out-of-pocket costs, most employees who receive a savings-plan contribution from their employers burn through it that same year, rather than bank it.

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President-elect Barack Obama said the government needs to provide help to U.S. automakers on condition that management, labor and lenders come up with a plan to make the industry “sustainable.”

“For the auto industry to completely collapse would be a disaster in this kind of environment — not just for individual families but the repercussions across the economy would be dire,” Obama said in an interview broadcast this evening on CBS News’s “60 Minutes.” Government aid could come in the form of a “bridge loan,” he suggested.

Under normal circumstances, Obama said, allowing General Motors Corp. to enter bankruptcy, undergo a restructuring and then emerge as “a viable operation” might have been a preferred route. If that were to happen now, he said, “you could see the spigot completely shut off so that it would not potentially permit GM to get back on its feet.”

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Ms. [SHARON] HOURIGAN: I saw the teachers that were, you know, sitting in broken chairs and, you know, falling out of them half the time, and they would spend their money on supplies for the classroom. They would take their free time to tutor the kids, and it was just incredibly appalling to me that after all of this time, after 30 years of this kind of service, that they would be treated so shabbily ”” just appalling.

[LUCKY] SEVERSON: Denying the union was not a risky venture because the diocese knew the law, as it is now, is on its side. In 1979, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Catholic teachers were not protected by the National Labor Relations Act because they weren’t included in it. But when the act was written, the vast majority of Catholic teachers were nuns and priests. Now it’s different. Today nine out of 10 teachers are lay teachers.

In a last ditch effort to get union protection under state law, the Pennsylvania House is debating legislation, known as House Bill 2626, which is similar to laws already enacted in three states. It would force the diocese to bargain collectively with teachers’ unions in religious schools of all faiths and allow them to bring grievances to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board ”” a bill the diocese strongly opposes.

Prof. [BRIAN] BENESTAD: If the Catholic schools are required to recognize the union, then you’re going to have government, you know, intervening in the school, making decisions about whether the bishops’ invocation of doctrine is really genuine.

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