On May 4, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 223,000 workers lost their jobs in April. It was the largest job loss in more than ten years.

That's terrible news and far surpasses March's devastating loss of 86,000 jobs, revised down to 53,000. But, because the bad news is based only on payroll data, it gets even worse: According to household-survey data, more than 300,000 workers actually lost their jobs (or completed temporary work without landing more) in April, raising the total to 6.4 million. That's a whopping increase of about 870,000 since October.

The unemployment rate leaped from 4.3 to 4.5 percent, the highest it's been in over two years. The rate was at a 30-year record low of only 3.9 percent just last October.

As they did in March, help services (temporary) workers took another beating, this time losing 108,000 of the 121,000 jobs lost across the service industry, despite gains in health, social and computer services. Temporary workers are typically among the first to get the axe in bad times; 370,000 have lost their jobs since September.

Manufacturing workers again suffered a major, monthly job loss. April's cut of 104,000 rockets their total to over half a million in just eleven months. (Worse, about 66 percent of those losses occurred in just the last four months.) At 31,000, electrical equipment and electronic component workers accounted for a big chunk of the April loss.

Construction workers were next with a loss of 64,000 jobs, even after the standard, seasonal adjustment. However, the BLS speculated that some of the job loss might be temporary, if attributed to the heavy rains falling over much of the country.

Conversely, employment went up by 41,000 jobs at eating and drinking establishments, dropping the net job-loss figure and reversing the retail trade's loss in March. Food stores also added jobs. But, despite these gains, the bottom line says that there was little or no April job growth for most industries. Average hourly earnings of production (nonsupervisory) workers increased by five cents, compared to six cents in March.

Once again, the Wall Street gurus who are in the business of forecasting these matters were caught off guard. They were expecting a small gain of 21,000 jobs, certainly a far cry from the loss of 223,000. (The same thing happened in March, when economists were expecting a gain of at least 58,000 jobs. Instead, they were stunned by the loss of 86,000, later revised down to 53,000.) The stock market initially tripped over the April employment news and took a hard fall. Then, amazingly, it got back up on its feet and brushed itself off with gains later in the day.

The March employment setback encouraged the Fed to quickly reduce the interest rate by another 50 basis points in April, between FOMC meetings. This even-more devastating April setback should just about guarantee that the Fed will reduce the rate again at the May 15 meeting, if not sooner. It'll be a shock if they don't, as economists begin to shy away less from the word recession.

The full employment report for April, along with a multitude of other labor and economic data, are available from the BLS.