Facing unemployment levels of close to 10 percent, Obama's bid to put Americans back to work is expected to be bolstered by a new Labor Department report that hundreds of thousands of jobs were created in May.
Obama recently predicted that Friday's report would be "strong," as he mounted a
campaign-style defense of his economic policies with an eye on mid-term elections this November.
Analysts predict that 500,000 jobs were created last month, enough to force the unemployment rate down one tenth of a percentage point to still-crippling 9.8 percent.
But experts said the likely surge in new jobs would come mostly from temporary government hiring for the 2010 census.
"The reported payroll gain will get a huge boost from temporary hiring by the US Census Bureau," said Andrew Tilton of Goldman Sachs.
Now, he said, the key issue will be how well the economy transitions from government stimulus to normal private sector growth, as Washington gradually withdraws crisis spending.
Ahead of the report Obama received some signs that businesses are indeed hiring again.
On Thursday, payroll firm ADP reported that private firms created 55,000 jobs last month, the fourth straight monthly increase.
Despite the positive trend, the rate of job growth is painfully slow for the White House and one in ten American workers who are unemployed and continue to stream into government offices asking for help.
The Labor Department says almost 4.7 million Americans now claim unemployment benefits, with 453,000 new claims in the last week of May alone.
That was down from the previous week, but still higher than the pace of economic growth would indicate, according to Andrew Gledhill, an analyst with Moody's Economy.com.
"With a few exceptions, initial claims have struggled to fall below 450,000, which is elevated from where claims should be at this point in the recovery," he said. "The labor market is improving only slowly."
The small firms that survived the brutal economic recession appear reluctant to take on new workers.
"The (unemployment) claims numbers are capturing the still-terrible state of the small business sector," said Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics.
Instead of rehiring staff many firms are asking workers to put in longer hours or are creating only part time jobs, according to two sets of data also released on this week.
Business output per hour has increased over six percent in the last year, which according to the New York Federal Reserve is the largest rise since the bursting of the dot-com bubble a decade ago. This despite stagnant pay levels.
Meanwhile, pollsters at Gallup reported that a fifth of the US work force was unemployed or worked fewer hours than desired.
That is a headache for Obama and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who described unemployment as "particularly difficult issue" during a speech to small business leaders in Detroit, Michigan on Thursday.
But there was one undiluted ray of hope for Obama amid the flurry of figures. The Institute for Supply Management's monthly survey of service managers showed its first increase in employment sentiment in 28 months last month.
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