Friday, October 08, 2010

Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration September 2010

Be sure to bookmark the "Scary Unemployment Dashboard"... it's live.

Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed has improved notably over the last few months while still remaining epically distressed by historic standards.

In September, workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined slightly dropping to 6.123 million or 41.7% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed increased to 20.4 weeks and the average stay on unemployment declined to 33.3 weeks.

Looking at the charts below (click for super interactive versions) you can see that today’s sorry situation far exceeds even the conditions seen during the double-dip recessionary period of the early 1980s, long considered by economists to be the worst period of unemployment since the Great Depression.