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Major layoffs in manufacturing and business-professional services pushed the state unemployment rate to its highest level in more than 25 years, the N.C. Employment Security Commission said Friday.

The December rate was 8.7 percent , a four-percentage-point rise since December, 2007. That compares to the national unemployment rate of 7.2 percent.

North Carolina's nonfarm businesses shed more than 120,000 jobs during 2008, 35,000 of those losses coming between the November and December reports alone .

Professional and business service jobs - which can include a wide variety of businesses from construction supply to temporary employment - dropped by nearly 8 percent for the year . Manufacturing placed second with a 7.4 percent decline in jobs .

Together, they accounted for nearly 80,000 job cuts during 2008 .

Those cuts are coming from companies large and small, and include vacant jobs that are going unfilled as well as production cuts at such major local employers as RF Micro Devices.

The Piedmont Triad has endured significant manufacturing losses for more than a decade. And though manufacturing jobs don't represent the proportion of the region's economy that they once did, losses continue to have a significant impact on industries with a long history here and across the state.

Those jobs dependent upon retail sales or not competitive with cheap offshore labor are the most vulnerable.

Furniture plants, for example, cut 8.1 percent of their workers across the state from December 2007 through December 2008. In the same period, textile plants cut 7.1 percent of their jobs.

Total nonfarm employment in the state was nearly

4.2 million jobs through the first three quarters of 2008, but the numbers began to drop rapidly as the magnitude of the banking, mortgage and investment crises hit simultaneously.

The figures show few bright spots. The education and health segment of the economy, for example, added 1,000 jobs during the December reporting period.

An economist who had a role in trying to correct the recession of the early 1980s - considered the worst post-war recession until the current one - said this week at UNCG that the nation's unemployment rate might not peak until 2010. Many economists have said that could mean an unemployment rate well over 10 percent.

The rate may not come back down to about 5 percent until the end of President Obama's first term, said Lyle E. Gramley , senior economic adviser to the Stanford Group Company's Policy Research . He served as an adviser to President Jimmy Carter and served later as one of seven governors on the Federal Reserve Board.

Gramley said that even with millions of layoffs, credit at a near-standstill and possible price deflation, Obama's stimulus will pay off by the end of this year.

"This is not the Great Depression," he said.

Contact Richard M. Barron at 373-7371 or richard.barron@news-record.com