High Road Publications

This report synthesizes key information on the health care workforce in South Central/Southwest Wisconsin. We provide a snapshot of the current workforce in 40 selected health care occupations based on a representative subset of area employers surveyed in Spring 2013. We also project near-term changes in that workforce based on future retirements and employers’ anticipated staffing needs. Comparing the 2013 results to those of a nearly identical employer survey in 2008 allows us to assess key changes and continuities in the region’s health care workforce over the last five years, and to gauge the accuracy of the 2008 predictions.

Across all occupations considered, the health care workforce in the region has expanded considerably over the last five years. This expansion was perhaps expected given the region’s aging population and their associated health care needs. Less expected was the precision of the 2008 projections across all occupations, given the economic turbulence of the last five years: employers predicted an overall workforce growth of eight percent between 2008 and 2013, and this is precisely what happened. Workers in 2013 were also slightly older than in 2008, a trend that may be driven in part by the Great Recession and the need by some workers to postpone retirement.

Document includes Executive Summary.

This study from the State Smart Transportation Initiative – a COWS project – seeks to make recommendations for improving current system operations and to point out directions that can help position DART to function as an integral part of the city’s and region’s transportation system. Wilmington functions as the hub of DART (Delaware’s bus system) in New Castle County, providing over 10 million passenger trips a year—including us and demand response paratransit. Thirty-eight of DART’s 60 routes serve Wilmington. Within the City of Wilmington, DART ridership continues to grow, resulting in bus congestion in the city’s central business district (CBD), particularly around and adjacent to Rodney Square. This success illustrates DCT’s role as an increasingly important part of the economic engine of the city. DCT contributes positively to the overall economic vibrancy of Wilmington through the movement of people, increased accessibility to the transportation system, improvements in air quality, and provision of access to jobs, medical care, and commercial centers. Document include Full Report and Executive Summary.

This report highlights how raising the low-wage floor will improve quality of life for the 100,000 workers in poverty-wage jobs in the city, and for a roughly equal number of poverty-wage workers in the suburban counties around city. Long term decline was made more brutal by the Great Recession, leaving workers at the mercy of a dramatic shift from manufacturing into services, declining unionization, and falling job quality. Evidence of the economic crisis abounds, yet Milwaukee’s problems — including racial disparity and residential segregation, child poverty, crime and incarceration, catastrophic drop-out rates, especially for African Americans and Hispanics — are not inevitable. They result from increasing economic isolation of the central city and increasingly isolation even of the middle of the labor market from meaningful effects of growth.

Full Report              Executive Summary

This report summarizes the accomplishments of and lessons learned from the Wisconsin Industry Partnerships (IP) initiative (2008–2012), a project directing state investment of more than six million dollars in concert with dozens of participating employers in order to increase the skills of over 6000 workers in the state. Wisconsin’s IP experience is especially relevant today as leaders turn their attention to building the skills of the state’s workforce.

This report presents recommendations on potential high impact philanthropic investments to advance deep building energy efficiency improvements at scale within the healthcare sector. It is one of five reports being developed for a coalition of six philanthropies that are collaborating to see what they – and others – might do to rapidly increase and scale the energy efficiency retrofit market for buildings in the United States. These philanthropies are the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Energy Foundation, Kresge Foundation, Living Cities, MacArthur Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. The other sectors for which market development strategies are being developed include: commercial office, commercial retail, single-family residential, and multifamily residential.

Wisconsin has the regrettable distinction of ranking among the worst states in the nation in terms of racial equality. Various aspects of the disparity – from education to jobs and income to incarceration – have been documented consistently for more than a decade. This report pulls together a range of data from public sources to make the racial disparities in the state clear. Brutal inequities in the state span measures of poverty, unemployment, educational attainment, and incarceration.

The Living Wage Ordinance for Milwaukee County would establish a floor on wages of $12.45 per hour for the work done in support of the public priorities achieved through county contracts, leases, and concessions. Using the best estimates of covered workers available, COWS simulates the impact of the $12.45 living wage on covered workers.

Living wage ordinances are enacted by local governments to raise job standards for workers at firms that do business with a city or county, or that benefit from taxpayer assistance. At least 140 communities in the U.S. have passed such laws over the past two decades, and there is now a significant body of research on their effect. The evidence shows that living wage ordinances raise wages for low-income workers, often by a significant amount, with few if any measurable negative effects on either employment or taxes. Any government considering a living wage ordinance of its own should consider the track record of living wage laws in other communities in order to implement the best living wage law possible.

Document includes Executive Summary.