Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed improved slightly in December while remaining notably distressed by historic standards.
Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more decreased to 4.766 million or 39.1% of all unemployed workers (the lowest level seen since November 2009) while the median term of unemployment dropped to 18.0 weeks and the average stay on unemployment declined to 38.1 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.
