The question is jobs, but there's no one right answer.

When President Barack Obama convenes a jobs summit Thursday, he and all the brainstorming economists and CEOs, small business owners and labor leaders face a dire predicament with no simple solutions.

The nation's unemployment rate has climbed to 10.2 percent, the highest since 1983. Some 15.7 million Americans are out of work. The average jobless worker has been unemployed for more than six months.

Meanwhile, the immediate benefits of the economic stimulus passed by Congress earlier this year are fading. The recession may be over, but analysts say many of the jobs lost in the downturn probably will not return and high unemployment is likely to persist.

But doing nothing is not an option. The Associated Press spoke with a variety of experts, looking for ways to create and preserve jobs. They offer four strategies they say should be in the mix at the jobs summit _ hardly an exhaustive list, but certainly a starting point for discussion.

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WORK-SHARING

When home construction fell sharply, orders coming in to Gary Melillo's department at a factory in Cranston, R.I. suffered. Workers at Taco Inc. continued building heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment to fill the plant's inventory. But if business didn't pick up, it was clear there wouldn't be enough work to go around.

"It would be very scary to be totally laid off," said Melillo, a 25-year veteran of the plant whose wife also works for Taco (pronounced TAKE-o). "That could be a double hit."

Taco wanted to avoid layoffs. If it cut workers who average nearly 18 years on the job, it couldn't be certain of getting them back when business picked up. Training new workers costs time and money. Instead, the company tried a strategy called work-sharing to spread the pain and preserve jobs.

Workers in some departments at Taco were cut back to either a three-day or four-day week. Unemployment insurance covered more than half their lost wages and they kept benefits including health insurance. This year, all Taco's 292 production workers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts have been on work-sharing at some point, cut back to four-day weeks.

"If we had not been able to use the work-sharing program, I believe we would have seen some potential layoffs," said Kyle Adamonis, Taco's senior vice president of human resources.

Rhode Island is battling 12.9 percent unemployment, spurring interest in a program in place since the early 1990s. Employers have used work-share to avert the equivalent of 5,800 layoffs through October, quadrupling the program's rolls from two years ago.