Addendum – A Year or More: The High Cost of Long-Term Unemployment. “In 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.”