Losing a job has become a frightening reality for many in Hawai'i who never imagined such a thing would happen to them. Without a reliable income stream, they now face once-unthinkable losses: their careers, their homes, their ability to support their families. This experience has mushroomed into a local and national crisis.

The national unemployment rate has breached the 10 percent barrier. When one in 10 people has lost the means of basic survival, the fledgling economic recovery seems an abstraction. The bills on the kitchen table? Those are very real.

And it get worse. When statisticians add in the people whose pay packets have shrunk or who have lost one of multiple jobs — or who simply have given up looking — a national average closer to 17 percent more accurately reflects the new American reality.

This is a problem more critical, and more demanding of government's focus, than can be expressed with statistics alone. Widespread unemployment can set off a cascade of social problems, and elected leaders owe the public a willingness to tackle the issue with creativity and a sense of urgency.

While Hawai'i's jobless number isn't as high as the national average, for those unemployed the situation is no less dire. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics records a broad variation in joblessness in its county-by-county survey. Areas that have emerged from a boom-and-bust cycle in housing, as well as many established manufacturing centers, show some of the worst figures, approaching and even topping 20 percent. Hawai'i's 7.2 percent pales in comparison.

But there are disturbing trends here, too. One was chronicled last week: The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that total foreclosure cases, new and ongoing, were pending against 4.18 percent of the surveyed loans at the end of the third quarter, a proportion that ranks Hawai'i the 10th worst among states. With many homeowners struggling to pay Hawai'i's typically higher-than- average mortgages even in healthier economic times, the loss of employment can instantly push them over the edge.

Whereas joblessness in the past more typically hit isolated industries, people on the front lines of this crisis report seeing a changed landscape.

The state Department of Labor and Industrial Relations has dispatched "rapid response teams" to help counsel newly laid-off workers and direct them to social services. Staffers report that these clients cut across all sectors, white- and blue-collar employees, many of whom had settled into what were once secure jobs. They have no idea where to turn now.

The federal and state governments are still in the formative stages of developing plans to kick-start the economy, initiatives that are urgently needed.

But the first prong of attacking this problem needs to be on sharpening the matchmaking of employees to jobs. Some of the new matches will require retraining, but others need job-hunters to think outside the box about how to parlay their own skills into jobs they might not have considered.

This service — helping to redirect the jobless into new or more fruitful employment tracks — must remain a crucial part of the state's outreach efforts.

To its credit, the department already has assembled a solid toolkit online to help Hawai'i's unemployed. In other states such as New York and Minnesota, government is experimenting with new technology: search engines that apply an experimental algorithm to interpret submitted resumes more intuitively, finding job opportunities that otherwise might be overlooked. This high-tech approach, developed by the Boston-based firm Burning Glass (www.burning glass.com), bears watching here.

Hawai'i lawmakers are facing a difficult session in January, one in which funding for many programs will be constrained. They need to maintain state support for the jobless, and explore strategies for nurturing the small-business sector as an engine for economic recovery.

There's no sidelining this issue any further. The unemployed — and those who depend on them — are suffering.

In Hawai'i and nationally, finding ways to lessen that pain in the short term and create sustainable industries for the long haul needs to take the top spot in the agenda.