Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration September 2012

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Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed went mixed in September remaining epically distressed by historic standards.

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined to 4.844 million or 40.1% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed climbed to 18.5 weeks and the average stay on unemployment rose to 39.8 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.