Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration May 2012

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Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed worsened notably in May and remained epically distressed by historic standards.

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more increased to 5.411 million or 42.8% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed increased to 20.1 weeks and the average stay on unemployment climbed to 39.7 weeks, the highest level ever recorded.

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.