Number of long-term unemployed workers declines, but still far from pre-recession levels
The US Department of Labor released its employment situation report on Friday. Less workers were employed for 27 weeks or longer, but the US still has a long way to go before returning to pre-recession levels.
This chart shows the decline in long-term unemployment. However, the US has yet to return to its pre-recession levels of unemployment.
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Last week'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 percent 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, 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.