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Karanja, W., L. Dresser, and M. Mackey. Wisconsin Career Pathways: Postsecondary Education for Low-Income, Low-Skill Adults. COWS, 2015.For Wisconsin workers and employers to thrive in the 21st Century, this critical progress in skills and talent infrastructure must be supported, connected, amplified and extended. Wisconsin is a national leader – in career pathways, in tech college training for displaced and other workers, and in industry/employer driven training investments in the “Fast Forward” grant program for demand-driven training). This infrastructure can help connect the unemployed to work, the underemployed to the skills they need to move toward self-sufficiency, and the state’s employers to relevant strategies for developing their own workers’ skills as well. This infrastructure is critical for advancing Wisconsin’s competitive position and for providing low-wage workers a stronger pathway to self-sustaining jobs.Document
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Salem, S., L. Dresser, and M. Mackey. Wisconsin Fast Forward: How Skills Training Is Working and Extending the Opportunity to Low-Wage Workers. COWS, 2015.In 2013, Wisconsin launched Fast Forward, a $15 million state investment in demand driven worker training. By mid-December 2014, the Wisconsin Fast Forward (WFF) worker training program planned to distribute approximately $10.4 million in worker training grants and was preparing to announce additional grants for the remaining nearly $3.6 million. Fast Forward is an unprecedented investment in Wisconsin and skills. It is an exciting step forward to build the skills that both workers and employers need in this state. Direct employer engagement in all stages of the WFF process helps ensure the relevance of the skills training delivered.Document
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, C., and W. B. P. Pulling Apart 2015: Focus on Wisconsin’s 1 Percent. COWS, 2015.
Wisconsin’s growth and prosperity are not being widely shared. Over the last 40 years, Wisconsin’s richest residents have experienced dramatic increases in income, while Wisconsinites not among the very highest earners saw little or no income growth. In 2012, Wisconsin reached a milestone, with a record share of income going to the top 1%.
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,. Wisconsin Job Watch - October 2015 Data Update. COWS, 2015.
Jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show an increase of 16,000 jobs in Wisconsin this past month. While statistics are subject to monthly revisions, and the exact figure might change, this substantial increase is significant and likely to remain the best month for job growth of 2015. This increase in jobs is very good news for the Badger State which has been on a weak trajectory since the recovery began. Wisconsin now is firmly and consistently posting a job count well in excess of the number of jobs the state had on the eve of the Great Recession (December 2007).
Because the population has grown since the Great Recession, just getting back to the 2007 job base doesn’t provide the same sense of opportunity, however. For the labor market to provide the same level of opportunity for our current population, the state job market is still 95,000 jobs short. In fact, even if this strong rate of job growth were maintained –a difficult feat in itself–the state is still half a year from recovering to the level of opportunity in 2007.
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Dresser, L., H. Halbert, and S. Herzenberg. High Road WIOA: Building Higher Job Quality into Workforce Development. 2015.Document
In response to the federal Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act (WIOA), most states are now in the latter stages of developing federally required plans and policies for operating their systems of workforce development under WIOA. This process creates an unprecedented opportunity to build into each state’s plan concrete ideas for using state and local workforce policy and practice to boost job quality. By developing new policies that help local boards connect workers to the best possible jobs, and supporting employers – individually and in partnerships – with efforts to improve jobs, WIOA implementation can create a “high road in workforce development.” It can make workforce systems an enduring force for better job quality.
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,. Wisconsin Job Watch - September 2015 Data Update. COWS, 2015.
The upward trend in Wisconsin continued in September. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Wisconsin added 1,400 jobs that month. The pace of job growth in September was much slower than that established in the previous two months when Wisconsin added14,000 (in July) and 7,000 jobs (in August). Still it is good to see consistently positive numbers, even if a slow pace. In Wisconsin, eight years after the beginning of the Great Recession, the number of jobs is, at last, defintely and consistently above the pre-recession level.
However, since the population of the state has grown steadily since the end of the recession, our labor market still has not fully recovered. If we aspire to the same level of opportunity that Wisconsin had before the recession we need to create jobs on pace with population growth. As our job market has not kept pace, Wisconsin still shows a deficit of 102,000 jobs.
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Dresser, L. Valuing Care by Valuing Care Workers. COWS, 2015.Document
Care workers—including providers of both child care and hands-on direct care supporting the elderly and people with disabilities—number 5.5 million and are employed in some of the fastest growing and lowest paying jobs in the American economy. Their “priceless” work, of such critical importance to families and society, rarely offers more than miserable wages and shoddy benefits. Improving these jobs and securing a decent standard of care requires fundamentally and dramatically reshaping the nation’s understanding of what care work is, what it is worth, and how to pay for it.
This paper is released as part of the Roosevelt Institute’s larger report, Blueprint to Empower Workers to Shared Prosperity.
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, C., and S. 3. A Boston That Works: Recommendations for Building Good Jobs and Strong Communities. COWS, 2014.Nearly one in four Boston families lives in poverty and incomes in the Greater Boston area are more unequally distributed than in the vast majority of other metro areas around the country. The good news is that the City has a number of important tools that can be engaged to address these problems. However, in order to maximize its effectiveness, the City will have to re-focus and re-organize its approach to economic development. Critically, the City must make combatting poverty and inequality a core priority in all of its programs. Moreover, the City should adopt a broader and more proactive vision of economic development and reorganize programs and structures accordingly. This COWS report, co-written with SEIU 32BJ, identifies five key ways in which the City can re-focus and re-organize its programs and provides a number of specific recommendations of steps the City should take.Document
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, C., and W. B. P. Pulling Apart: Focus on Wisconsin’s 1 Percent. COWS, 2014.
Income inequality continues to grow in Wisconsin and the United States, producing an ever-widening chasm between the rich and poor. Over the last 40 years, Wisconsin’s richest residents have experienced dramatic increases in income, while Wisconsinites not among the very highest earners saw their incomes stagnate or decline.
Wisconsin’s growth and prosperity are not being equally shared. The rewards of prosperity have been concentrated on the richest 1%. As a state, this should be of substantial concern, not only because of the slow or non-existent growth in incomes for the remaining 99% percent of families, but also because increasing disparity comes with substantial social costs.
All data in this report comes from The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, 1917 to 2011. Income figures are presented in 2011 dollars.
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Dresser, L. Impact of Minimum Wage Increase on Wisconsin Families. COWS, 2014.
This report analyzes the economic impact of a minimum wage increase to $10.10 per hour for Wisconsin workers. Increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 by July 2016 would increase wages for over half a million Wisconsin workers. Additionally, as parents see wages go up, some 234,000 Wisconsin children will see family income rise as a result. Of the 587,000 Wisconsin workers who would be affected by raising the wage to $10.10, 57 percent are women, 79 percent of workers are 20 years old or older, 47 percent of workers have at least some college education, 42 percent of workers work more than 35 hours per week, nearly two-thirds (64 percent) are in families with income under than $60,000.
Additionally, the report addresses the claim that increasing the minimum wage destroys jobs. Over the last twenty years, numerous studies have confirmed that minimum wage increases do not reduce overall employment levels. A letter signed by nearly 600 economists, including seven Nobel prize winners and eight past presidents of the American Economic Association, states that “the weight of evidence now [shows] that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.”
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