Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed improved in September while still remaining distressed by historic standards.
Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined to 4.146 million or 36.9% of all unemployed workers while the median term of unemployment declined to 16.3 weeks and the average stay on unemployment increased to 36.9 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.
