Friday, September 07, 2012

Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration August 2012


Be sure to bookmark the "Scary Unemployment Dashboard"... it's live.

Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed were mixed in August and remained epically distressed by historic standards.

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined to 5.033 million or 40.0% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed jumped to 18.0 weeks and the average stay on unemployment climbed to 39.2 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.