By Lee A. Daniels

There is no good news in last week’s federal jobs report. The situation its statistics outline is largely unchanged from that of August or even of several months earlier. But that is precisely why it’s seemed to produce a noticeable sag in the spirits of Democratic Party partisans, who had hoped for a political boost going into the mid-term elections early next month – and in the hopes of millions of American workers.

Instead, what they and the country got was more of the same. Unemployment remains at 9.6 percent, as it was in August. The relatively weak private-sector hiring during September was too small to offset the shedding of jobs that occurred among federal, state and especially local governments. And the average duration of unemployment for jobless workers continues at record levels – now more than 33 weeks.

As if that weren’t dispiriting enough, at this point one looks in vain beyond the mid-term elections for signs from a Washington in which the White House and Congress are mired in a bitter, partisan divide that a concerted effort will be made to fashion the kind of job-creation measures progressive labor experts say are needed.

Even as the Great Recession itself has officially ended, the statistics in the Bureau of Labor jobs report and other analyses also underscore two other continuing and intertwined devastating by-products of the economic crisis: the squeezing of the American middle class as a whole, and the even sharper paring of the black middle class.

This over-arching dynamic is evident in such data as the record average duration of unemployment mentioned above; in the fact that 6.1 million of the total 14.8 million jobless have been out of work for more than six months, and about 2 million have not found work for a year or more; and in the record number of workers who have taken part-time jobs only because they can’t find full-time work.

All these are signs of the disappearance of jobs with wages that until recently enabled millions of Americans, blue-collar and white-collar, to live comfortably middle-class lives. That they no longer exist helps explain why the number of people living below the nation’s poverty line increased by a stunning 4 million from 2008 to 2009. About one is seven Americans, nearly 44 million people, lived in poverty then – and that number itself has undoubtedly risen.

Even more alarming are the statistics which show an intensifying racial disparity in the level of suffering. It can be seen at its simplest when one “unpacks” the overall unemployment rate. For whites, it is 8.7 percent; for blacks, 16.1 percent. The racial skew, which affects Latino-Americans, too, to a slightly lesser but still wrenching extent, doesn’t stop there, of course; it courses through many facets of the employment and unemployment arena.

These twin dynamics are among the most important reasons workers and their families need Congress and the White House to work together to produce a legislative package that puts Americans back to work. But the prospects for that happening, at least for the immediate future, are dim – and that is no good news.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.