Pundits and historians will wrestle with the meaning of the 2016 elections for years. But from Bernie Sanders supporters on the left to Donald Trump backers on the right, voters sent one common
message: They are frustrated with an economy that has left them behind and elected officials who seem indifferent to their plight. People feel anxious and insecure: With few opportunities to get ahead, ordinary middle-class goals such as sending a kid to college or retiring seem permanently out of reach. What resonated with voters were the candidates’ vows to take action on behalf of
the millions who felt ignored. Here in Vermont people face many of the same problems they did last year, the year before, and the decade before that. A few encouraging things happened in 2015: Incomes rose across all levels, and Vermont’s poverty rate dropped. But these signs come from just one year of U.S. Census data; it’s too soon to know if they represent the beginning of a trend.
The U.S. economic recovery has been slow. Although Minnesota hasn’t been immune to the effects of an economic recovery characterized by fits and starts, Minnesota’s economy has a number of strengths, compared to the recent past and to national trends. Some economic indicators are back to pre-recession levels, including unemployment. Considering perhaps our most comparable neighbor, Wisconsin, our relative economic strength shines through with Minnesota’s higher labor force participation and higher median wages.
However, the national economy is not seeing the growth in wages and family incomes that we might expect seven years into the economic recovery. As a result, many working Minnesotans are still struggling to reach economic security. The inflation-adjusted wages of many Minnesotans have just gotten back to where they were before the Great Recession hit, but the longer-term trend is that wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living. As a result, many families can’t meet their basic needs for child care, transportation, housing and health care.
A review of recent economic information reveals that too many working Minnesotans still lack the quality jobs that would allow them to support themselves and their families.
In The State of Working Wisconsin 2016, COWS finds that the long shadow of the Great Recession is finally lifting in Wisconsin. The state has more jobs than ever before, unemployment rates have fallen to pre-recession levels, and workers that want full-time work are having an easier time finding it. Labor market opportunities are more clear and consistent than they have been in nearly a decade.
Longer-term challenges that Wisconsin faces, long documented by COWS, remain daunting. Wages have been stagnant over the last three and a half decades and workers have very little to show for increasing productivity. Women earn less than men and the gap is slow to close. African Americans have suffered declining wages and growing disparity. The wage reward for higher education is evident, as is the difficulty of making ends meet without completing some post-secondary education. One-in-four workers toils in a poverty wage job and low-wage sectors are growing faster than better-paying ones. Racial disparities, while hardly unique to Wisconsin, are particularly extreme here. A variety of economic and social indicators of racial inequality consistently identify us as among the most racially unequal states in the nation.
Hard work is supposed to provide the income to allow people to get by and set their children up for future success. North Carolina policymakers have violated that promise, both with their policy choices that make it more difficult for North Carolinians to connect to good jobs and with their failure to enact the policies that make sure work translates into greater economic security.
The national economic recovery began in 2009, but it has yet to reach North Carolinians across the state. Too many workers have failed to find work or left the labor market for lack of jobs in their community. Far too many who are working find their wages falling short of what it takes to make ends meet and otherwise contribute to their communities’ improvement.