Recovery-less Recovery: Unemployment Duration May 2011

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

Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more jumped to 6.2 million or 45.1% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed increased to 22.0 weeks and the average stay on unemployment surged to 39.7 weeks, a new high for the series.

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.