By The Editors

On Friday, President Obama  signed a measure once again extending benefits to the long-term unemployed—even as it became likely that  still another extension may be necessary next spring.

His signing of the measure will bring a measure of relief to the hundreds of thousands of long-term jobless who this fall had already lost their unemployment benefits or were facing a cutoff by the end of December. The government defines long-term joblessness as being out of work for six months.

About one-third of the nation’s 15 million jobless are in that category; and more than one million of them were in imminent danger of being left without government help. In September and October, a total of 600,000 had already reached the end of their extended benefits. The actual dollar amounts of benefits vary by state; but overall they average out to about $300 a month.

The new extension provides for up to 20 additional weeks of benefits to the long-term jobless who have or are about to be cut off.

The President said the need for the extension was underscored by the release Friday of the federal labor department ’s monthly jobs report, which showed that the official overall unemployment rate had reached 10.2 percent in October—the highest it’s been since 1983.

However, as worrisome as that figure is, it is widely accepted that the official unemployment rate actually understates the full extent of the nation’s jobless crisis, because it includes neither those who have given up looking for work nor those who are working part-time only because they can’t find full-time jobs.

Further, some population segments of the labor force are considerably worse off than the overall statistic indicates: The official Latino unemployment rate is 13.1 percent; that of African Americans is 15.7 percent, and that of teenagers as a group is nearly 28 percent.

Those numbers are part of a web of statistics which, even as the economy seems on track to a recovery in broad terms, does not augur well in the short-term for the unemployed.

A chief reason is that the recovery, at least in its early stages, is likely to be accomplished without creating many new jobs – just as occurred after the recession of 2001.

Although the monthly job losses have declined considerably from last year – they reached 190,000 in October – they are still occurring. That means that the unemployment rate itself will continue to rise; many economists expect it to do so well into 2010.

In turn, that means that the number of Americans currently out of work – about 15 million – will increase, and so, too, will the long-term unemployed. That crisis within a crisis has now led the federal government to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed an unprecedented four times, something which has never happened since it established the category sixty-one years ago.