Length of unemployment reaches Great Depression levels

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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 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.

Currently, there are some 6.763 million civilian workers that have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more with the average stay on unemployment standing at a whopping 34.4 weeks and the median stay reaching 23.2 weeks.

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