The Great Recession’s Toll on Long-Term Unemployment

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Released: November 2010

Related Topics: Economic Security, Employment & Wages

Authors:

Michael Greenstone • Director, The Hamilton Project; 3M Professor of Environmental Economics, MIT; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
Adam Looney • Policy Director, The Hamilton Project; Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution

Introduction

The October employment numbers, released today by the Labor Department, show tentative progress toward recovery. The U.S. economy is creating jobs for the first time in four months, with an increase of 151,000 jobs last month. The private sector added 159,000 jobs, continuing ten straight months of private sector job growth.

For the past few months, The Hamilton Project has examined the “job gap,” or the number of months it would take to get back to pre-recession employment levels (while absorbing the 125,000 people who enter the labor force each month). In this month’s posting, we also explore the impact of the Great Recession on the length of unemployment for many American workers and find that the number of long-term unemployed has risen sharply since the Recession began.