WASHINGTON — Though job losses accelerated last month, the United States has not yet hit bottom.

In a bleak report on Friday, the Labor Department said that almost 600,000 jobs disappeared in January and that a total of 3.6 million jobs had been lost since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, rose to 7.6 percent, from 7.2 percent a month earlier.

Losing more than a half million jobs in each of the last three months, the country is trapped in a vortex of plunging consumer demand, rising joblessness and a deepening crisis in the banking system.

The contraction in jobs is already steeper than in any recession since at least the early 1980s. But economists warn that several more shoes are about to drop.

The first is the growing severity of the global recession, which has already started to choke off exports from the United States. Growth in China has slowed to a fraction of its usually brisk pace, leading to brutal downturns in South Korea, Japan and other Asian nations. Much of Europe has slipped into a recession, too.