WASHINGTON - The nation's unemployment rate jumped to 8.5 percent in March, the highest since late 1983, as a wide swath of employers eliminated 663,000 jobs. It's fresh evidence of the toll the recession has inflicted on America's workers, and economists say there's no relief in sight.

If part-time and discouraged workers are factored in, the unemployment rate would have been 15.6 percent in March, the highest on records dating to 1994, according to Labor Department data released Friday.

The average work week in March dropped to 33.2 hours, a new record low. Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 5.1 million jobs, with almost two-thirds of the losses occurring in the last five months.

"It's an ugly report and April is going to be equally as bad," predicted Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

The deterioration in the jobs market and a worse-than-expected reading of the strength of the services sector in March come despite a few hopeful signs recently that the recession - now the longest since World War II - could be easing.

Orders placed with U.S. factories actually rose in February, ending a six straight months of declines, the government reported Thursday. Earlier in the week, there was better-than-expected reports on construction spending and pending home sales. And last week a report showed that consumer spending - an engine of the economy - rose in February for the second month in a row - after a half-year of declines.

The job market traditionally doesn't rebound until well after a recovery starts. But the stock market generally bottoms out before the economy, and stocks have been rising for three weeks.

The Dow Jones industrial average spent most of Thursday over 8,000, the first time that happened since early February, before adding 216 points to close at 7,978. The Dow dropped about 15 points in afternoon trading.

Last month's tally of job losses was slightly higher than the 654,000 that economists expected. The rise in the unemployment rate matched expectations.

Employers cut 651,000 jobs in February when the jobless rate was 8.1 percent, the same as initially estimated. January's job losses, however, were revised much higher, to 741,000 from 655,000. Figuring prominently into that downgrade: much deeper job cuts in construction and professional and business services. January marked the worst payroll losses since the fall of 1949.

The number of unemployed people climbed to 13.2 million in March. In addition, the number of people forced to work part time for "economic reasons" rose by 423,000 to 9 million.