The Unemployed: Victims or Villains?

The latest unemployment figures show that labor markets remains stagnant. Unemployment has been over 7% for going on five years now and it is declining so slowly that it would be September 2019 before we returned to the 4.4% that prevailed in May 2007 (calculations based on trends since October 2009 when unemployment peaked at 10%). Why is this? What is the causal factor responsible for this terrible number of chronically unemployed?