Workers and Policy Publications

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.

Document

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.

Document

2013 Healthcare Staffing Assessment – Nursing and Pharmacy

Document

The national recovery has been weak. And in Wisconsin, the recovery has lagged behind even the meager pace posted nationally. This Labor Day, COWS has released The State of Working Wisconsin Update 2013, which shows just how much the Wisconsin economy has lagged behind the national pace and the sectors that account for the Wisconsin difference.

We find that Wisconsin would have 33,000 more jobs today if we’d only kept on pace with the national recovery. Since the Wisconsin economy began to grew, we’ve added 99,000 jobs. If Wisconsin had tracked the national recovery, the economy would have added 132,000 jobs. That difference, 33,000 jobs, is a measure of the how Wisconsin lags behind the national trend. To be sure, even that national trend is too weak. But in Wisconsin, we should have 33,000 more jobs today than we do.

Document

COWS produced Vital Signs 2013, a regional economic review for the Incourage Community Foundation. This economic analysis summarizes the most recent data to help focus discussions and decision-making on economic growth and opportunity in South Wood County. From schools to employers, wages to social supports, and employment to homelessness, COWS offers data that provides a shared understanding of where South Wood County is, and where it can improve.

Document

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

The reinvigoration of manufacturing presents Milwaukee with a real opportunity. And the manufacturing opportunity could provide an answer to some of the city’s most ruinous problems, especially the economic isolation of the central city population. Manufacturing Better Opportunity & A Stronger Economy provides key data on manufacturing in Milwaukee and the problems which the central city community confronts. Additionally, it discusses the work that the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership/BIG STEP has done and will continue doing in order to build a stronger bridge from community to manufacturers throughout the region.

Document

Greener Reality takes stock of the green economy, looking at what works (and doesn’t) in related skill and credentialing initiatives and placing them in a broader context of human capital development, community resilience, and climate change. Defining equity, sustainability, and greater democratization as critical elements of a truly greener future, the paper considers the practical and political challenges to achieving these in the United States. This report builds on our earlier work in Greener Pathways and Greener Skills. Documents include Full Report and Executive Summary.

Document Document

Wisconsin Jobs and Low-Income Working Families looks at the one in four working families in Wisconsin who struggle to get by as well as the tens of thousands of workers whose jobs provide low wages and few benefits. The report was produced by COWS as part of the Working Poor Families Project.

Document

This fact sheet from COWS and the Wisconsin Women’s Council, released in honor of National Pay Equity Day, shows that despite the growing importance of women’s contribution to the labor force and to household incomes, the gender wage gap stubbornly persists irrespective of age, race, or level of education. In 2010, Wisconsin women earned, on average, only 77.8 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The Wisconsin gap, while significant, is slightly smaller than in 2009 when women earned just 75 cents for each dollar earned by men. Nationally, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has reported that the decline in the wage gap is mostly due to falling wages for men.

Document