The latest employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed were mixed in December while still remaining distressed by historic standards.
Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined to 3.878 million or 37.7% of all unemployed workers while the median term of unemployment declined increased to 17.1 weeks and the average stay on unemployment went flat at 37.1 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.
