The Addendum: A Year or More: The High Cost of Long-Term
Unemployment - November 2011 looks at long-term unemployment
using statistics from the third quarter of 2011 (the three month
period from July to September). Approximately 31.8 percent of
the nearly 14 million Americans who were unemployed had been
jobless for a year or more, according to the U.S. Department of
Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That percentage
translates into more than 4.4 million people, nearly the
population of Louisiana. The challenge of long-term unemployment
has persisted over the last year, even as the overall
unemployment rate has improved somewhat. A Year or More: The
High Cost of Long-Term Unemployment, a report released by the
Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative in April 2010, found that in
December 2009, 23 percent of the 14.7 million unemployed had
been out of work for a year or longer.