The last unemployment report before the election came out Friday, and the news was middling: Unemployment ticked up to 7.9 percent.
The private sector created more than 180,000 new jobs, but state and local governments resumed laying workers off. That discrepancy is part of a longer-term trend.
For a few years now, private sector employment has been growing, but since mid-2010, state and local governments have eliminated roughly half a million jobs.
"There's real consequences to these huge cuts in the public sector, for overall growth in the economy and for public services that we all need," says Sylvia Allegretto, labor market economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
She says close to 40 percent of the all public sector jobs losses have come in California.
"Class sizes are increasing because we had to lay off a ton of school K-12 teachers, our police department ... we had to lay off a lot of those officers, is struggling," she says.
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