Be sure to bookmark the " Scary Unemployment Dashboard "... it's live. Today's employment situation report showed that conditions for the long term unemployed improved in November remaining epically distressed by historic standards. Workers unemployed 27 weeks or more decreased to 4.786 million or 40.1% of all unemployed workers while the median number of weeks unemployed dropped to 19.0 weeks and the average stay on unemployment declined to 40.0 weeks. 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.