Based on data gathered from Intuit’s online payroll service, companies with less than 20 employees have added jobs since June 2009, said Business Week Additionally, data from SurePayroll shows the average paycheck for workers at businesses with fewer than 100 employees has stabilized, said Business Week.

President Obama has put forth a number of measures intended to get people back to work, including tax incentives for businesses that hire new employees and pushing banks to free up more credit for small businesses.

John Bishop, a labor economist at Cornell University, told Business Week that temporary incentives like tax credits could create more than 2 million jobs in a year.
“It potentially has a huge effect, and small business would be the primary beneficiary of that,” Bishop told Business Week.

The store will eliminate about 10,000 product demonstrator positions, most of them part-time, after hiring an outside marketing company, Shopper Events, to take over demonstration operations, Sam’s Club Chief Executive Officer Brian Cornell said in a memo to employees. The warehouse chain will cut another 1,200 membership recruiting jobs – two in each of the 600 Sam’s Club stores across the country.

The memo, posted on the Wal-Mart web site, said the change is an effort to improve in-store sampling and demonstrations of food and beverages, personal wellness and electronics products.

In a separate announcement on Jan. 11, Wal-Mart said it will close 10 under-performing Sam’s Club stores, eliminating about 1,500 jobs, said Business Week. Overall, Sam’s Club employs about 110,000 people.

Shopper Events, based in Rogers, Ark., said it would hire about the same number of employees that Sam’s Club is letting go, according to Business Week.

Laid-off Sam’s Club employees can apply for the Shopper Events jobs. The company already handles in-store demonstrations for Wal-Mart.

The unemployment rate unexpectedly fell to 10 percent last month, from 10.2 percent in October, as employers cut the fewest number of jobs since the recession began. The average work week and earnings also rose in November, the Labor Department reported.

The economy shed 11,000 jobs last month, an improvement from October’s revised total of 111,000 lost jobs, and significantly better than the 130,000 Wall Street economists had expected in November, said the Associated Press.

Economists say that substantial job growth is needed to make a dent in the unemployment rate. According to the Labor Department, 15.4 million unemployed people are seeking work, and 11.5 million others are working part-time but want full-time jobs or have given up job hunting altogether.

In a troubling sign for small businesses, a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business showed more small companies plan to reduce employment in the next three months than plan to add jobs, said the AP.

The country shed 190,000 jobs in September, even as other economic indicators have pointed to a recovery from the recession. President Barack Obama on Friday signed a bill that would extend unemployment benefits up to an additional 20 weeks and extend the first-time homebuyer tax credit.

Republican critics of the Obama administration are pointing to the double-digit unemployment rate as proof that the $787 billion stimulus package is failing; meanwhile, labor unions and some Democrats are calling for more spending to create jobs, according to the New York Times.

The highest level of unemployment came at the end of 1982, when it hit 10.8 percent, reported the Times.

The independent federal board monitoring the stimulus plan’s progress credited the program with saving or creating 640,329 jobs. Teaching and education positions made up the bulk of those jobs — about 325,000.

An earlier jobs report contained faulty data and overstated the number of jobs saved or created, according to the Associated Press.

Some Republicans voiced criticism about the numbers. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the report “bewildering” when 3 million jobs have been lost in the past year.

Job numbers were collected from businesses, contractors, state and local governments, nonprofit groups and universities.

Calculating “jobs saved” produces an inexact estimate, and using data from so many sources can produce errors, said the AP.

Vice President Joe Biden defended the report, saying it shows the recovery plan “is operating as advertised.”

The president’s 2010 budget plan doubles funding for the Community Development Financial Institutions fund, which helps provide loans to small businesses and consumers in disadvantaged communities that lack access to affordable credit, reported the Wall Street Journal.

The tax credit program, funded by the economic stimulus package, will reward private sector companies that invest in energy, education, health care and manufacturing projects to create jobs in low-income areas. The credit would cover 39 percent of the cost of the investment over a seven-year period.

Under the plan, community banks with under $1 billion in assets would be eligible for lower-cost capital if they submit a small business lending plan and document their lending in quarterly reports, said the White House. If approved, the banks would pay the government a 3 percent dividend instead of 5 percent.

Obama also said he will seek legislation raising the limits for Small Business Administration loans from $2 million to $5 million and as much as $5.5 million for manufacturing, according to Bloomberg News.

The president said these steps will lead to “more jobs, more growth, and a stronger economic recovery.”

Some legislators and small business owners have complained that the administration’s recovery efforts have focused too narrowly on bailing out big banks.

Obama asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and SBA administrator Karen Mills, to gather a group of regulators, congressional leaders, lenders, and small business owners “to determine what additional steps we can take to get credit flowing to small businesses that want to expand,” said Bloomberg News.

The U.S. is a historically mobile society. The most movement happened in the 1950s and 60s, when about 20 percent of the population moved each year. The percentage of people changing residences fell to a historic low of 11.9 percent in 2008, according to U.S. Census data.

Because many people are having trouble selling their homes, they can’t relocate to an area where jobs are more plentiful.

“The labor markets are sluggish. They’re not adjusting efficiently,” economics professor Richard Cebula told MSNBC.com, adding the situation “exacerbates a recession.”

The Bank of Mexico reported that money transfers from the U.S. to Mexico dropped 20 percent in May, to $1.9 billion, compared to last year, according to an article in USA Today.

An estimated 12 million Mexicans work illegally in the U.S. and have suffered more unemployment than the population at large, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Jack Martin, an immigration-control advocate, told USA Today that less money going to Mexico might mean more money staying in the U.S. to stimulate the economy.

In Mexico, small, rural towns known as pueblos fantasmas, or “ghost towns” because so many men have left to work in the U.S., have been hit especially hard, said USA Today.

For the mainly women, children and elderly left behind in those small towns, the suffering is very real.

“Thank God, we haven’t had anyone die of hunger yet,” Jesus Tello, 63, a farmer in the isolated town of Pacula, told USA Today. “But things are getting harder and harder. People are living on beans.”