The unemployment rate increased to 9.2% in June, the Labor Department reported, but if the recession hadn’t pushed so many people out of the labor market it would have been much worse.

The duration of unemployment continues to increase and sat at an average of 39.9 weeks in June. More than four million people who want jobs, or nearly a third of the unemployed, have been out of work for more than a year. Those are the people are hanging in and looking for work, but a large number have given up altogether.

The share of the population in the jobs market, called the labor-force participation rate, fell to 64.1% last month — the lowest level since 1984 when women were still just beginning to enter in full force. The participation rate peaked in 2000 and has been steadily declining since as the effect of women taking full-time jobs plateaued and Baby Boomers began to retire, but the decline accelerated sharply during the recession. The participation rate was 66% at the start of the recession and 65.7% when the recovery started in June 2009. If the participation rate were still at that level, the unemployment rate would be more than 11% right now.

With nearly a third of the unemployed out of work for over a year, it makes their reintegration back into the labor market more and more difficult. People out of a job that long tend to lose skills and experience long-term effects on their lifetime earning power. It’s even harder to reintegrate workers who have dropped out altogether.