A total of 240,000 jobs were lost last month on a net basis, significantly more than had been anticipated, again pointing to a prolonged and severe downturn. “We’re heading for a deep recession,” Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight, told Bloomberg News. “Banish the word mild from your vocabulary. It’s big, it’s bad, and it’s broad-based.”

The Labor Department revised its jobless figures for September, from the initially reported 159,000 net job losses to 284,000. Total employment has declined by 1.2 million in the first 10 months of 2008, with more than half of this fall recorded in the last three months. Economists estimate that the economy must generate an additional 100,000 jobs each month just to keep up with population growth.

Jobs were shed across a number of sectors:

• Manufacturing employment declined by 90,000 in October, including employment in fabricated metal parts (11,000 jobs lost), furniture and related products (10,000) and motor vehicles and parts (9,000).

• Construction employment fell by 49,000. The Labor Department noted that since peak activity in September 2006, construction employment has fallen by 663,000.

• The employment services industry lost 51,000 jobs.

• Retail trade employment declined by 38,000, with auto dealerships (20,000 jobs lost) and department stores (18,000) the worst affected.

• Financial sector employment fell by 24,000 and is down by 200,000 jobs since its peak in December 2006.

The rising unemployment rate is having a devastating social impact. According to the New York Times, only 32 percent of the officially unemployed are drawing state benefit checks because of onerous eligibility restrictions and other conditions designed to drive people off the books.

Moreover, the real jobless rate is far higher than the official 6.5 percent figure. The Labor Department’s monthly report acknowledged that the number of “involuntary part-time workers”—that is, those who are unable to find full-time work, or those whose hours have been cut back to part-time levels—increased in October by 645,000 to 6.7 million.

Also not counted as unemployed are those “marginally attached to the workforce”—i.e., those who wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job in the last year, but not in the four weeks preceding the survey. A total of 1.6 million people were in this category in October. Among the marginally attached were 484,000 “discouraged workers” who have stopped actively looking for employment. Other marginally attached workers include those who were unable to look for work in the preceding four weeks due to school attendance or family responsibilities.

When the involuntary part-time and marginally attached workers are counted, the unemployment rate stands at 11.8 percent, up from 11 percent in September and from 8.4 percent a year earlier.

Commenting on the Labor Department data, the Wall Street Journal’s Sudeep Reddy and Justin Lahart noted, “One of the more worrisome aspects of today’s report: signs that the labor market was declining substantially even before the worst of the credit crisis hit… If conditions were that bad before October, they’re likely to be far worse in the months to come as companies adjust to the new credit environment and consumers retrench with added pressure on housing and credit markets.”