WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Today’s release of the most recent jobs numbers is yet another reminder that conservatives in Congress need to get behind legislation to boost job creation in our economy. At this point in an economic recovery — especially one following such a deep recession — we should be seeing upward of 300,000 jobs created per month, but the economy only added 80,000 jobs in October, although August and September’s data were revised upward by a total of 102,000 jobs. Still, the three-month pace of job creation is only 114,000. That’s woefully inadequate.

So what’s holding back more sustained job creation? The gap in demand caused by the collapse of the housing bubble and Great Recession means that big corporations are still sitting on several trillion dollars in cash, waiting for sufficient customers to spur higher investment, and job seekers are still waiting for investments trickle down into jobs.

But conservatives in Congress — who are determined to slash government spending where it is needed most in infrastructure and in support for state and local jobs, while preserving or enhancing tax cuts for the wealthy — are doing real damage.

Congress’s failure to act to address the demand gap is the most direct contribution to the unemployment problem. Economists estimate that President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act would create upward of 1.9 million jobs. Yet conservatives in Congress refuse to vote on the legislation.

The percentage of adults with a job has plunged since the recession and hasn’t yet recovered.

Hopefully, they will get the message today that addressing the jobs crisis should be their No. 1 job, especially because the financial crisis in Europe and other global economic woes mean we need to boost demand here at home. A key impetus that is pushing the media to cover the continuing jobs crisis, rather than focusing solely on federal budget deficits, is the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Not only are conservatives in Congress blocking efforts to spur private-sector job creation by not making needed investments in infrastructure but they are also refusing to help state and local governments deal with their still-acute fiscal problems, which is continuing to add to unemployment. Many states are strapped by declining tax revenue due to the collapse of the housing bubble but they face the same kind of reverse class warfare, driven by conservatives committed to tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by cuts in government services, that conservatives in Congress are committed to.

Combined, this is dragging down economic growth. While private-sector employers added 104,000 jobs in October, government shed 24,000 workers, with nearly all of those (20,000) in state government. Since their peaks in the summer of 2008, state governments have shed 151,000 jobs and local governments have shed 502,000. Read MarketWatch’s full coverage of the employment report.

Payrolls show modest October gains

The upshot: We are indeed in an “L”-shaped recovery. (See chart above.) The share of those with a job rose from 58.3% to 58.4% in October, and the unemployment rate dropped to 9%, the 28th month of unemployment at or above 9% in the past 30 months. The rise in the employment rate is encouraging but it is important to note that the share of those with a job is now only three-tenths of a percent higher than the trough hit just in July. One has to go back to 1983 to see employment rates hovering at this low level.

Upward revisions may indicate that the economy is at an inflection point, moving toward greater job creation. At such an inflection point, the data released on the first Friday of the month will often understate job gains and be subject to greater revisions, as more new firms are created in the month and fewer are closing shop than over the past couple of years. But it is too early to tell if this is the case, and given that the current pace of job creation remains below that of early 2011, we should remain wary of this hypothesis.

The BLS data, though, do provide some indications that employers are seeing the kind of demand that may induce them to ramp up hiring. Temporary help added an average of 18,000 jobs over the past four months, higher than the first half of the year when it added only 4,500 jobs each month. Overall, hours are flat, averaging 34.3 hours per week and hovering between 34.2 to 34.4 for more than a year now, but average weekly hours for production and nonsupervisory employees rose to 33.7 in October from 33.5 a year ago.

In particular, manufacturing hours stand at 41.5 hours per week, up from 41.2 a year ago, and higher than they have been since 2000. While manufacturing employment strengthened in early 2011, adding an average of 35,000 jobs from January to April, over the past three months only 1,000 new manufacturing workers have been hired — 8,000 hired in durable goods and 7,000 laid off in nondurable goods. Third-quarter gross domestic product data indicate that businesses have been ramping up investments in industrial and transportation equipment, which hopefully will show up in faster employment growth in future months.

But the private sector alone is not going to fill the job creation gap — the key to a sustained economic recovery. Our economy is producing $1.36 trillion less in products and services today, or 9.2% less, relative to where our nation’s output was headed before the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Filling that gap is a key goal of the American Jobs Act, while doing nothing — the key goal of conservatives in Congress — is actively harming our economy. The latest case in point: When a vote to tax millionaires to fund spending on infrastructure that would create jobs and boost productivity came up in the Senate Thursday, Republicans filibustered it.

This is irresponsible and un-American. Solving America’s jobs problem should be the Senate’s number one job.