“A new report released by the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI) shows that two years into the “recovery” from the Great Recession of 2008-2009, 1.4 million, or one in every seven, New York workers is unemployed, under-employed or has given up looking for work. Long-term unemployment is at record levels. Half of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months and 29 percent have been jobless for a year or more. The report, FPI’s 2011 annual edition of the State of Working New York, indicates a modest decline in the state’s unemployment rate over the past year, but shows that this decline is deceiving since it results solely from discouraged workers dropping out of the labor force. Adding back those workers would make the state’s July 2011 unemployment rate 9.6 percent, more than one-and-a-half percent higher than the official 8 percent unemployment rate for that month and higher than in late 2009, considered the recession “bottom” in the job market.”