It's all about jobs.

With the official unemployment rate up to 9.8 percent and the unofficial rate as high as 15 percent or so, policy makers are talking the talk at least about how jobs are the number one priority.

There is little disagreement that the national jobs picture is ugly. The unemployment rate stands at 9.5 percent, unchanged from June 2009. If you include the under-employed, the fed up and not looking crowd, and the frustrated college grads who decided to go back to college, the rate is probably closer to 20 percent.

However, there are some bright spots-okay, let's call them not-as-bad spots-when you break down the job data state by state.

Voters in two California cities, Chula Vista and Oceanside, recently passed ordinances that prohibit the use of government-mandated project labor agreements (PLAs) on municipal projects. While the measures differ slightly from each other, in each case, the cities can not agree to sign PLAs with construction unions. Typically, a contractor enters into a PLA with a labor organization, which then determines the wages, benefits, other terms of employment on a project. The project itself could include union and non-union workers.

The election results appear to be one more sign of the dwindling influence of unions in America. In 2009, just 12.3 percent of American workers were union members, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. That’s about half the percentage from the early 1970s, according to this study out of Princeton. 

Seems we're seeing tepid indications of a pick up in hiring. For one thing, the Bureau of Labor Statistics just announced an increase in 162,000 nonfarm jobs in March and that the unemployment rate is holding steady.  What 's more,  there are also signs of more hiring going on among very small businesses, those with under 20 employees.

That last point could be really good news, because employment among such companies is supposed to be a leading indicator of recovery, since they tend to increase hiring before  more bureaucratic and less-nimble bigger firms do.