With the Labor Department’s January unemployment report to be released on Friday, it is being expected that the Department will update its underestimated 7 million job loss projections for the year that ended in March 2009 – with the number likely to increase by approximately 800,000, taking the job loss toll, during the recession, to almost 8 million.

The Labor Department actually carries out revisions on employment levels each year, based on unemployment insurance tax data that is submitted to the states by the companies.

Noting that the new figure will help illustrate the magnitude of the jobs crisis, Heidi Shierholz, labor economist with the union-backed think tank Economic Policy Institute, said: “It’s an enormous understatement of the severity of the crisis. It confirms that things were actually worse on the ground than what the reports suggested.”

Meanwhile, with Julia Coronado, senior US economist at BNP Paribas opining that it will be some time before the crisis is completely turned around, analysts by and large perceive that during 2010, nearly 1 million or 2 million jobs would likely be generated.

As such, analysts project that jobs will remain scarce despite the supposed recovery of the economy – the Gross domestic product (GDP) has shown an increase for two quarters in a row –and it will take at least 3-4 years for the job market to return to a somewhat ‘normal’ condition.