Friday, June 06, 2014

Employment Situation: Unemployment Duration May 2014

Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed improved in May while still remaining distressed by historic standards.

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more declined to 3.374 million or 34.6% of all unemployed workers while the median term of unemployment declined to 14.6 weeks and the average stay on unemployment went declined to 34.5 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.