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There’s a crisis in service work in Milwaukee. Too many of these jobs—in food service, janitorial work, security services, and human and health services—offer low wages, inadequate and often unpredictable hours, and benefits packages that are usually weak, if they exist at all. For Milwaukee, these jobs have been a sorry replacement for the good union manufacturing jobs that once defined opportunity in the city. This economic transformation has especially damaged Milwaukee’s Black community, resulting in extreme racial disparity.

All of this was well documented before COVID-19. In the last two years, the underlying crisis in these jobs has been exposed and it has grown. Until we build a strong, consistent floor of better wages, more predictable hours, and stronger benefits in these jobs, the crisis will continue.

The City of Milwaukee can help to lead this effort. In every aspect of policy, the City can seek to strengthen job quality, raise labor standards, and support and build a high-road approach to service work in the city.

For decades, a handful of women have been celebrated as pioneers in construction, manufacturing, transportation, and distribution careers. Despite years of work, these occupations remain “nontraditional” for women and people of color and present unique barriers and challenges. Raising Women’s Success in Apprenticeship (RSWA) is driving systemic change to make these industries more open, accepting, and inclusive of nontraditional workers. This report summarizes the network’s work, identifies key factors of success for getting women into nontraditional jobs, and identifies the remaining challenges that will require a substantial change in policy and practice to make success for women the norm.

$15 by 2025: Who Gains with a Higher Minimum Wage in Wisconsin is a short fact sheet about the demographics of who would benefit from raising the minimum wage by 2025 and how Wisconsin compares to other states on this issue.

Released for Labor Day 2021, the State of Working Wisconsin report focuses on how working people are doing and continues to shine a spotlight on the state’s brutal Black-white disparities.

A project of COWS, the State of Working Wisconsin has presented the workers’ perspective on the economy in the state for more than two decades: who is winning, and who is being left out; where is disparity growing; and what’s happening to the economic chasm separating Black and white workers in the state.

City leaders, including mayors, play a critical role in community wealth building and are this brief’s intended audience. However, this work requires multiple actors, including community organizers and developers. This brief is useful to anyone committed to equitable economic development in their community but is intended primarily for city leaders. This report was made possible by generous funding from the Surdna Foundation.

ABSTRACT: Accessibility-related research has advanced considerably since its foundational conception six decades ago. Yet, despite widespread acceptance of the concept, these methods are still rarely used in practical applications among transportation agencies and policymakers. Until recently, the challenges were mainly technical but now they are more practical. Practitioners are often faced with decisions about appropriate methods and metrics, which are difficult to answer from the current literature. This study attempts to produce a clearer understanding of the effects that those decisions have on practical outcomes, based on data spanning many geographies across the U.S. We test a variety of metrics—including different modes, destination types, analytical geographies, and metric definitions—in regions spanning seven states. This study points to several potential best practices, including the use of non-work walking accessibility metrics in multimodal analysis and the use of decay functions in accessibility metrics, and provides a strong foundation for future research.