Four years after the official end of the Great Recession, millions of America’s workers continue to struggle to survive without a paycheck. This persistently high level of unemployment is the real cliff that threatens our economy. Lost wages, a smaller tax base, less consumer spending, and disproportionate growth in lower-wage sectors pose fiscal challenges for decades to come.

This report—the first of two being released by the National Employment Law Project this spring—explores who the long-term unemployed are and how their ongoing estrangement from the labor force hurts the entire economy. We suggest that the diversity of this population means it will take a variety of job creation measures to reattach them to the workforce, and that the longer we wait in the name of austerity to implement these programs, the more intractable the problem of long-term unemployment will become. The second report, scheduled for release next month, will propose a range of policies to trigger a recovery for those who have thus far been left out, ranging from short-term options designed to give the long-term unemployed a leg up in the labor market, to longer-term projects that would invest in America’s workers and communities. Among this report’s key findings are the following: