U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said the drop in the unemployment rate shows the U.S. economy is recovering, and extending a cut in the payroll tax will help boost hiring and spending even more.

The jobless rate remains high and “the urgency is to do something now,” Solis said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

The Labor Department today said the jobless rate fell to 8.6 percent in November, the lowest since March 2009, after employers last month added 120,000 jobs.

The government also revised to 100,000 the number of jobs companies added to their payrolls in October, up from the initial estimate of 80,000.

A brighter picture for jobs is helping erase concerns that the world’s largest economy will slip into a recession, even as Europe’s debt crisis threatens to derail the recovery.

Growth indicators are “steady, they’re slow, but nevertheless they are occurring and we need to continue down that path,” Solis said.