The
monthly US jobs report out today shows encouraging news for the economy, adding 162,000 jobs,
keeping the unemployment rate steady at 4.1 percent.
In Wisconsin, the state of working Wisconsin is mixed, according to a report by the same
name from the High Road Strategy Center at UW-Madison.
Laura Dresser is an economist and associate director at the center, and Laura, thanks a
lot for being here.
I'm delighted to be here.
So how do our job numbers stack up and how have they trended since your last Labor Day
report?
Yeah.
It's been a really rocky time for the economy as a great report today from the national
level.
But on net, the national labor market has barely grown since January of 2025.
And Wisconsin, as of the data that came out last month, Wisconsin's total job base had
actually fallen and was slightly below where it had been in January of 2025.
So your report shows median wages have grown steadily, so part of the mix that we're talking
about now sitting at just over $26 an hour.
But what stands out in that stat?
That's interesting, because the median, it's great to see that going up, because it's going
up faster than inflation.
It's been steadily going up faster than inflation for most of the last 10 years, except for 2022
when inflation was really high.
So that's a great stat on that sense.
But there's a lot of disparities hidden underneath the median.
And so we look in the report to see what's going on.
And some of the gaps between, for example, the lowest wage workers and the highest wage
workers continue to shrink a little bit because of the tightness of this labor market and
the way that lower wage workers have moved forward in wages faster than higher wage workers.
And there's also some kind of demographic gaps.
Yeah.
Sure.
There's a big gender gap in wages.
People are familiar with that, though, over the last 40 years, which we document in this,
men's wages have only risen a little.
Women's wages have come quite substantially up.
So the gender gap has closed over the last 40 years, and even over the last little bit.
But other gaps are large and have grown, especially racial gaps, black, white disparity,
black, Hispanic, white disparity has grown quite substantially.
As to what a lot of people are hyper-focused on, that being inflation, you say there's
concern that inflation could wipe out wage gains of 2026, how so?
Yeah.
That's even true in the national report from today.
Inflation, the rate of inflation is higher than the rate of wage growth.
This is what happened in 2022.
Those wages went up in nominal terms, but the cost of living just wiped that right
out.
That looks like what we're heading into for 2026.
So while we got a high in 2025, and that's great news, 2026 looks much less likely that
that will be a strong gain and possible that it will be a loss because of the high inflation.
As to affordability, you report that one in three households in Wisconsin cannot afford
basic things.
You described this as nothing new, but is it about the cost of living, per se, or is
it about the wage?
Yeah.
I think it's really important to see both of those things in balance.
I think when we are focused on the cost of living, like we see the prices go up especially
recently of energy, gas, utilities, that makes folks focus on the cost of living.
But in the background, the suppression of wages, the long term kind of under the rates
of economic growth, wage stagnation that this nation has had, even this last five years
of growth, have not gotten us back to kind of moving ahead as the economy moves ahead.
And if it was, the questions of affordability would be wiped out by having a better job.
Another prong that you looked at in your report was the role of immigration in Wisconsin.
How does that factor into the Wisconsin economy?
Yeah, it's important to remember that immigrants make enormous contributions to the Wisconsin
economy.
23 billion annually estimated by some.
Seven percent of the Wisconsin workforce is immigrants.
And what we document this year is research nationally that shows that when the massive
deportation raids began, it obviously decreases employment of the immigrant workers who are
deported, obviously.
But that spills over as well to a significant decrease in the employment of immigrant workers
who are worried or are having to cover family responsibilities for other folks.
Just the fear in the community represses there.
But the evidence also shows that with these raids comes a decline in employment for white
men as well.
And so what we have is a kind of structure that's, I think, in theory supposed to be
better for the economy in some ways.
But it's these massive raids, the evidence is that they're actually shrinking the economy.
Laura Dresser, will you be there?
Thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
As to the rise in cost of energy, many people want to see an even bigger turn to renewable
sources.
Solar panel fields and wind turbines have been cropping up next to and on top of Wisconsin
farms for a couple of decades now.
But as reporter Stephen Potter explains, not everyone is on board.