Income Inequality Near Record Levels 

The income gap between the rich and the poor remains near its highest level ever, according to a new report by the Wisconsin Budget Project and COWS at UW Madison. The wide chasm between the very highest earners and everyone else poses hardships for Wisconsin’s families, communities, and businesses.

In Wisconsin, policy makers seem to increasingly assume that work, and work alone, can provide a decent standard of living. However, working families continue to face a slew of challenges – low wages, inadequate benefits, insufficient hours – generated by the very jobs that are supposed to be the answer. This report highlights the disconnect between state policies and the realities of Wisconsin families working in jobs at or near the poverty line.

The landscape of public support systems is changing in the state of Wisconsin, in the direction of making benefits more difficult to access for people who toil in bad jobs or cannot secure employment at all. A sharp turn toward more accessibility by redesigning the work requirements and better understanding the nature of bad jobs is needed.

Wisconsin ended 2016 with 2.93 million jobs. In terms of job growth, the year was not particularly strong or consistent. Wisconsin’s December job total is just slightly above the level reached at the end of the summer. In the last quarter of 2016, the Wisconsin labor market grew by 10,500 jobs, or an average of just over 3,000 jobs per month. 

Wisconsin’s labor market is growing and is well above 2007 levels, but current opportunity lags behind the level established for workers in 2007. These dynamics are clear in the job deficit figure. If the state’s labor market had grown as fast as the population of potential workers, the state would have 79,402 more jobs today than it does. 

Wisconsin Job Watch: 4th Quarter 2016 Update marks a change - COWS will now provide a quarterly picture of how Wisconsin's economy is faring.

View Wisconsin Job Watch archives here.

Oregon’s current care economy is vast and largely invisible. Currently underinvested, it creates and exacerbates poverty and inequality. We are missing the opportunity to invest adequately in the care economy in order to build a stronger, more inclusive economy and better life for us all. This report seeks to bring care work into view.

Earning roughly $10 per hour, paid caregivers—nearly all women and disproportionately women of color—are seriously underpaid for the essential work that they do and the skills they bring. Far too many must rely on public benefits like food stamps just to make ends meet. Alongside this substantial and poorly compensated paid care workforce is a legion of unpaid care workers. A very conservative measure suggests that unpaid care generates the equivalent of 167,000 full-time care jobs a year inside families in Oregon.

Additionally, the cost of care is extremely high. Full-time, center-based infant care for one child cost 51 percent of median income for single parent Oregon families for 2014, and 15 percent of median income for married-couple families, in stark contrast to the federal benchmark for “affordable” child care of 10 percent of family income. The private market for long-term care for seniors and people living with disabilities or chronic health conditions can also be prohibitively expensive. Medicaid provides almost half of the non-family funding for long-term care, but only to those who have exhausted their assets and income. 

To change the care economy, the State of Oregon must invest resources directly into it. For that investment to pay the highest returns economically and socially, it should be through comprehensive programs that support unpaid caregivers; make paid care more available, accessible, affordable, and culturally appropriate; and employ paid caregivers with wages and working conditions that allow for dignity, comfort and access to care themselves.

Manufacturing in the Midwest continues to evolve. Firms increasingly rely on highly specialized and flexible processes, deploying new technology that redefines workers’ jobs and the skills needed for them. In Milwaukee, the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership (WRTP)/BIG STEP has spearheaded the creation of a new registered apprenticeship in response to these dynamic forces. Industrial Manufacturing Technicians (IMT) are now working and being trained at firms across the upper Midwest. The success of this apprenticeship derives directly from the WRTP/BIG STEP’s long-standing and deep relationships with manufacturing firms and labor unions built over the course of two decades. The success also owes to the long tradition of apprenticeship in Wisconsin and the ways this project has built from the existing model. This paper offers the story of this apprenticeship innovation which is remaking apprenticeship for the new and rapidly evolving manufacturing sector.

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. These disparities are gaining increasing attention from activists and policy makers. Even so, and despite considerable local and statewide efforts to close these gaps, too few in Wisconsin understand the way that Wisconsin’s level of racial inequality is, in fact, dramatically more pronounced than in other states.