WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Nearly two years after the Great Recession began, the U.S. economy still is shedding jobs, economists said ahead of the Labor Department's November jobs report.

Another 100,000 jobs were destroyed during November, according to the median forecast of economists surveyed by MarketWatch. It would be the 23rd consecutive month of job losses, the longest losing streak since the 1930s.

The official unemployment rate is expected to remain at 10.2%, the highest since 1983.

The Labor Department's report is expected at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

After the steep drop in gross domestic product in late 2008 and early 2009, the economy is growing again, but it's not growing fast enough to create any jobs. So far, at least 7.4 million jobs have been lost, an estimate that's likely to be revised to more than 8 million.

"The recent economic data have been consistent with our view that the economy is recovering, but at a distinctly subpar pace," wrote Jan Hatzius, chief economist for Goldman Sachs, in a note to clients. "Growth looks too sluggish to lower the 10%+ unemployment rate to a meaningful degree anytime soon."

The weak job market threatens to drag the economy back under. Foreclosures and credit-card defaults are still rising, putting pressure on community banks to preserve capital and refrain from lending to small businesses. Holiday retail sales are on a Scrooge-like pace.

However, most economists we surveyed think the economy will continue to grow at about a 3% annual pace through the middle of next year. That should be just fast enough to encourage some businesses to increase the work week for their remaining workers and to start hiring again.

Not one of the 43 economists surveyed is forecasting an increase in nonfarm payrolls for November. But there are reasons both fundamental and technical to think the loss will be less than in October, when payrolls fell by 190,000.

The most encouraging sign for the labor market has been the steady decline in first-time jobless claims. Initial claims have fallen five weeks in a row, from 532,000 to 457,000. The four-week average of new claims has fallen 14 weeks in a row, from 573,000 to 481,000.

Usually, a drop like that would be an unambiguously positive sign of job growth. But this recession isn't acting like others. This time, it's not the layoffs that are hurting us as much as the lack of hiring. More than a third of the 15.7 million people officially classified as unemployed have been out of work longer than six months.

Fewer are being laid off, but fewer are being hired as well.

For the first time on record, most of the unemployed people have lost their job permanently; they don't expect to be called back when sales pick up. Instead, they'll have to find new jobs or even new careers, a process that could take some time. The economy is restructuring and recovering at the same time.

There are technical reasons to think the November job losses will be less than October's. The November payroll numbers could benefit from the way the government statisticians adjust the figures for seasonal factors, economists said. The seasonal factors place a great weight on the most recent observations.

Because so many jobs were lost at the end of 2008 (and, to a lesser extent, at the end of 2007), the seasonal adjustment process could be assuming that all those losses were due to normal seasonal variations, and not to the extremely distressed economy. That means that November's payroll figures will likely overstate what's really going on.