Friday, December 03, 2010

Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration November 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 weakened slightly in November while remaining epically distressed by historic standards.

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more increased to 6.313 million or 41.9% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed increased to 21.60 weeks and the average stay on unemployment went flat at 33.8 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.