Recovery-less recovery: Unemployment endures

Unemployed workers are staying unemployed for increasingly long stints.

Nothing says recovery less than a steadily increasing pool of unemployed workers facing the specter of a quickly increasing average (and median) length stint on unemployment.

In fact, as has been widely reported, the median and average stay on unemployment has simply exploded far surpassing the highest levels seen since records have been regularly kept.

Looking at the chart above you can see that today’s sorry situation far exceeds the situation after the last recession. Actually, the conditions are worse than even 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. [Editor's note: This paragraph was changed to make it correspond to the chart pictured above.]

Currently, there are some 6.133 million civilian workers that have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more with the average stay on unemployment standing at a whopping 29.7 weeks and the median stay reaching 19.4 weeks.

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