[Excerpt] Congress in recent years passed a number of bills intended in part to jump-start a recovery in the labor market from the recession that began in December 2007. Members of the 112th Congress are interested in the labor market’s response to these measures to help them decide how well the legislation has worked and whether additional job-creation legislation may be warranted in light of the pace and composition of job growth since the recession’s end in June 2009. Accordingly, employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is analyzed in this report from December 2007 to June 2009 (the recession), from June 2009 to April 2012 (the recovery through the latest month for which data were available at the time of the report’s preparation), and from December 2007 to April 2012.