The recession pushed North Carolina's unemployment rate to 11.1 percent in January, a historic high, the Employment Security Commission reported Wednesday. January also marked a year that the state's jobless rate has been stuck above its previous high.

January's unemployment rate rose from a revised 10.9 percent in December to the highest level since states started their current calculation method in 1976. Before this recession, the state's peak unemployment rate was 9.7 percent in March 1983, a level topped in February 2009 and exceeded ever since. Experts say the latest unemployment rate is certainly the worst since the Great Depression.

"This is pretty bad," said Andrew Brod, an economist at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "Not since the 1930s have we seen this."

Unemployment in January increased by 8,325 workers to more than 500,000.

The past year has been frustrating for Bob Chipman, who lost his job with a software sales company in January 2009.

"I'm looking for anything now," said Chipman, 58, of Raleigh. "It's just a really, really difficult market."

While his wife works, Chipman said he continues his daily search for work on Internet job sites, social networking sites and the newspaper classified section. He said he gets a lot of initial nibbles from employers, but the competition from the growing numbers of unemployed is so stiff that he gets crowded out.

"They can hire a bank president to be an accountant," he said. "We have to really squeeze to survive. We don't have anything but paying bills and staying at home."

The country's January unemployment rate decreased slightly to 9.7 percent.

Since the U.S. fell into recession in Dec. 2007, North Carolina has lost 275,000 nonfarm jobs, including 101,500 manufacturing workers. That means the state's employers would have to hire 4,600 more workers every month for five years to get back to the level preceding the recession, the Employment Security Commission said.

The high unemployment rate has meant longer periods before workers like Chipman are able to find new jobs. About 40 percent of the country's unemployed have been out of work six months or longer. But in one encouraging sign, the U.S. Labor Department reported last week that the number of long-term unemployed fell for the first time since November 2008.

One reason that joblessness may remain high for a long time is that the recession was worsened by a banking crisis that hasn't yet been resolved, Brod said.

"It's more than consumers and businesses deciding they ought to cut back for a while. There's actual obstacles set up in the blood veins of the economy. Things aren't circulating in the economy," Brod said. "Small businesses and farmers are still having trouble getting loans to move their businesses forward. When small business owners can't even get the financing just to operate normally, they're not going to hire people."