I hope everyone who actually READS this grasps the significance.

Record numbers face long-term unemployment
In an analysis

 

of the BLS monthly jobs data, Economist Heidi Shierholz

 said the May report was disappointing and underscores the need for additional government action to create jobs, provide aid to the long-term unemployed, and assist state and local governments.

Shierholz' analysis highlighted the continued rise in long-term unemployment. The median unemployment spell lasted a record 5.4 months in May, and the portion of unemployed workers who have been out of work for more than six months reached a record 46%. The sharp rise in long-term unemployment means that many workers will exhaust their standard six months of  unemployment insurance before they find a  job and could lose benefits altogether if lawmakers fail to approve extended benefits. House lawmakers last month voted to extend unemployment benefits to millions of long-term unemployed workers who have been jobless longer than 26 weeks. But the Senate has still not voted on the measure, and tens of thousands of workers have already exhausted their benefits.

Shierholz stressed that even under a best-case scenario, it will take years to return to pre-recession levels of employment. The labor market is currently 7.4 million payroll jobs below where it was at the start of the recession in December 2007, and when population growth is factored in, it means that a staggering 10.4 million new jobs are needed to return the country to the pre-recession unemployment rate of 5.0% - not counting the Census jobs that will end this summer. She offered some perspective on how long it would take to achieve that goal by showing that during the boom of the late 1990s, the fastest rate of employment growth seen was 2.6%, in 1998. "If we could achieve that same extremely strong level of growth from this point forward, we would still not get down to pre-recession unemployment rates until January of 2015," Shierholz wrote.