Workers and Policy Publications

Immigrants have been shaping Wisconsin’s economy since the state’s founding, and it is critical to ensure that today’s immigrants have access to the skills and education that will build shared prosperity and strengthen our economy into the future. This report provides an overview of demographic trends among the immigrant population, and addresses pressing needs with regard to citizenship, language training, and access to higher education that prevent these working families from thriving economically.

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%.

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.

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.

Wisconsin’s unsteady labor market finally added jobs in July which offers good news in the face of the decline in jobs since March. In June, Wisconsin had the same number of jobs that it had at the beginning of the 2015 which was also and finally the same as number the state had before the recession began (December 2007). Over the last two months of summer, July and August 2015, some 20,000 jobs were added in the state. Wisconsin is now solidly above pre-recession levels, and also hopefully on a consistently positive job growth path as well. It is good news that Wisconsin’s labor market is finally larger than it was nearly 8 years ago. Still, the potential labor force in the state is much larger than it was in the past, and the jobs we have today are not sufficient to keep up with our population growth. As Figure and Table 1 make clear, Wisconsin still faces a significant jobs deficit and needs stronger growth to fill that gap. In order to simply provide the same opportunity that we had in 2007, Wisconsin’s “jobs deficit” now stands at around 102,000 jobs.

After a very dramatic loss in the number of jobs in the month of May, June brings slightly better news for the state of Wisconsin. In June, the state added 1,900 new jobs. On net, however, the Wisconsin job market of 2015 has been largely stagnant. Last month, in the middle of the year, Wisconsin posted 2,882,000 jobs, a number only slightly higher than the state’s January count. And, in fact, the number is just barely higher than the number of jobs Wisconsin had when the recession began over seven years ago. And because the population of the state has grown over those years, Wisconsin remains substantially short of the number of jobs needed to keep opportunity in line with 2007 levels. The Wisconsin “jobs deficit” still stands at 115,700. At the current rate of growth, it would take Wisconsin another 5 years to fill our jobs hole.

There is a crisis of poverty-wage work in Wisconsin. 700,000 Wisconsinites, one of every four workers in the state, earns less than $11.36 per hour – the wage required for a full-time, full-year worker to keep a family of four out of poverty – according to a new report from COWS and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

The report helps draw a more complete picture of poverty-wage work in Wisconsin, using federal data to highlight problems in the labor market, the workers that stands to gain from a higher minimum wage, the jobs these workers hold, and the real costs of living that Wisconsinites face. The report also challenges the argument that raising the minimum wage is bad for business.

The State of Working Wisconsin 2014 uses the best and recent data available on jobs and wages to describe the serious economic challenges that Wisconsin continues to face.

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.”