Total employment during the Great Recession was quite low and it stayed very low for years and years. Living standards were fine....so long as you were employed which increasingly fewer people were.
The percentage of the working age population engaged in paid work absolutely crashed during the Obama years. The government used all sorts of accounting tricks to just not count a lot of people as unemployed. The number of Americans on food assistance was shocking - higher than ever - and they still needed food assistance for several years. That tells you all you need to know about how bad the economy really was.
More people were on food assistance because the rules were set so more people qualified for it.
Likewise more people scooted out on work for “disability” because more people were given it.
And then there were those who stopped looking for work because the available jobs didn’t match with their ideas of themselves.
But the ratio of people actually pounding the pavement — literally and figuratively — was quite low.