Washington - The US unemployment rate climbed to 8.9 per cent in April, its highest level since 1983 as companies shed another 539,000 jobs during the ongoing recession, the US Labour Department said Friday.

But the monthly loss was the smallest since October and lower than expected, suggesting that the worst of the country's devastating economic downturn may be in the past. US stocks climbed more than 1 per cent in morning trading on Wall Street.

The jobless rate was up from 8.5 per cent in March and has climbed 3.9 percentage points over the past 12 months. The struggling US economy has now lost 5.7 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007.

The new government data "underscores the point that we're still in the midst of a recession that was years in the making and will be months or even years in the unmaking," President Barack Obama said, unveiling some new job training and re-education initiatives for the unemployed and promising more in the coming weeks.

"We should expect further job losses in the months to come," Obama said, though he suggested the slowing pace was another signal that the world's largest economy was stabilizing.

The International Monetary Fund and many other outside economists have forecast that the US unemployment rate will reach double digits in 2010.

The less-than-expected loss in April was in part due to the government hiring an extra 66,000 workers, many on a temporary basis to help complete the country's upcoming 2010 census.

Employment in manufacturing, construction and retail continued to decline. Opportunities existed in health and education. Economists had predicted 600,000 jobs would be lost in April, according to a survey by Bloomberg News.

The Labour Department also revised upwards its job losses for February and March by another 66,000 - up from a combined total of 1,314,000 jobs to 1,380,000 jobs.