ALLENTOWN - US President Barack Obama hailed good news Friday after surprising figures showed only 11,000 jobs were lost last month, but he warned of "more bumps in the road" ahead to recovery.

The US labor market saw a dramatic improvement in November as the number of jobs lost narrowed to 11,000 and the unemployment rate dipped to 10.0 percent, official data showed Friday.

"This is good news, just in time for the season of hope," Obama told a meeting of residents in Pennsylvania, who loudly cheered and applauded his speech.

"But I want to keep this in perspective. We still have a long way to go.

"I still consider one job lost one job too many. And as I said yesterday at a jobs conference in Washington, good trends don't pay the rent. We need to grow jobs and get America back to work as quickly as we can."

Seeking to show he cares about economic blight, and to drum up momentum for jobs creation effort, Obama headed to Allentown, Pennsylvania, Friday on the first leg of a tour of regions battered by the recession.

On Thursday, the US leader had convened a jobs summit with top business executives, economists and labor leaders at the White House, warning that the private sector would have to be in the vanguard of a new job creation effort.

Obama is also make a major speech on the economy on Tuesday at the Brookings Institution in Washington containing new measures to boost job creation.

"I think that the numbers today show that we continue to make much needed progress in getting this economy going again and in getting the right trend going in hiring," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

He noted the labor department figures were the best assessment of the job picture that had been released in 22 months, but cautioned that the fight against 10 percent unemployment would remain tough.

"We are clearly moving in the right direction, the recovery act got economic growth going again and now we see positive movement in jobs," he said, referring to Obama's 787 billion dollar economic stimulus package.

"There will be bumps along the way, there will be ups and downs in the process."

Christina Romer, the head of Obama's council of economic advisors, adopted the same tone of controlled optimism, noting that jobs figures were "volatile and subject to substantial revision."

"It is important not to read too much into any one monthly report, positive or negative," she said in a statement.

The figures, released Friday morning, showed the US unemployment rate easing from 10.2 percent in October.

The Labor Department jobs figures showed massive improvement from October, when figures showed 111,000 jobs were lost, though that figure was revised down Friday from 190,000.

The report, which comes a day after Obama hosted his jobs summit, was far better than analyst expectations of a loss of 125,000 jobs and an unchanged jobless rate.