A decade after the Great Recession, Wisconsin’s economy, at least in employment and family income, has finally and meaningfully recovered. Unemployment and involuntary part-time employment rates are low. And, nearly a fifth of the way into this new century, the value of the median income of four-person families finally exceeds its 2000 level. This is very welcome news for working Wisconsinites.
This good news is not untarnished. Despite job gains, Wisconsin’s job growth is slow relative to the national pace. Wages are still in no way keeping pace with worker productivity. Wisconsin is comparatively weak in more lucrative occupations: professional, scientific, technical, and information. Our manufacturing sector, while growing, is a still significantly smaller than at the beginning of the century. And inequality continues to grow. One in five workers currently holds a poverty-wage job with few benefits. Rural economies are declining. Wisconsin’s black/white disparities still lead the nation.
Publication
Equity in Apprenticeship is a report series from COWS at UW-Madison. It highlights programs that use apprenticeship to extend occupational opportunity to historically marginalized groups, especially people of color and women.
The Industrial Manufacturing Technician (IMT) program is the product of collaboration between labor and management leaders in Milwaukee’s manufacturing sector and has created a new rung in the ladder in production jobs.
Equity in Apprenticeship was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. We are grateful for their generous support. The findings and conclusions presented in this series are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Infants and toddlers in Ohio need high-quality child care. There are nearly 400,000 working mothers in Ohio with children under age six and most use some form of child care when parents are working or for child enrichment purposes. This paper discusses how best to make sure children get good care and parents can continue to work, particularly for the 200,000 Ohio children who live under the official poverty line.[1]
Child care is expensive for Ohio families. Child care in Ohio is also often low quality which means that children aren’t getting the enrichment they need at a time in their life when high-quality care is essential to future success. Finally, Ohio’s child care system is complicated to navigate, with parents not always knowing how to find or determine what constitutes quality care. For these reasons, the public sector has a crucial role to play in pushing quality improvements and in helping parents with the costs.
Publication
In November 2012, fast-food workers in New York went on strike and the Fight for $15 was born.
Over the last five years, the movement has lifted wages for more than 17 million workers across the
nation by fighting for and winning numerous minimum wage policies (National Employment Law
Project 2016). Substantial minimum wage increases are underway in California, New York, Oregon,
and more than 30 cities and counties around the country. In states and cities covered by them, these
new minimum wages will increase earnings for 25 to 40 percent of workers (Reich, Allegretto, and
Montialoux 2017; Reich et al. 2016). After four decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality, the
movement has delivered real, much needed, and meaningful progress in a remarkably short period of
time.