- Wisconsin has lost over 137,000 jobs, almost 5 percent of its pre-recession job level
- Nearly half of those jobs, 66,100, were in manufacturing.
- Manufacturing employment is down 13 percent from pre-recession levels and down 25 percent since 2000
- Wisconsin's 9.0 percent unemployment rate is twice its pre-recession level
- Wisconsin's real (inflation corrected) median wage is now $15.48, below the $15.74 national median and only 32 cents above its 1979 level, despite a near doubling in worker productivity
- While improving, the gender gap in Wisconsin wages persists. Women's median wage is 82 percent of men's. If men's wages hadn't fallen over the past 30 years, the gap would be 72 percent.
From the conclusion:
On this Labor Day, working Wisconsinites have little to celebrate about the economy. Despite a few “green shoots” and a slowdown in the rate of job loss, the state of their state’s economy — and the region’s — is grim.
What Wisconsin’s workers need is a real strategy for economic development. This strategy needs to follow from a sober and disinterested assessment of our current challenges, resources, weaknesses, strengths, needs, and viable opportunities. To actually raise living standards, it needs to be “high road” — competing on value rather than price, taking sustainability seriously, sharing created wealth more equally, friendly to any business that will do the same. This strategy needs to be clear in its policy priorities, implied investments, and funding sources. It needs to gain support from a critical mass of key actors — business, labor, state and local government, education, our Congressional delegation, the general public — whose cooperation and contribution are critical to its success. And it needs to be articulated forcefully and clearly by diverse champions — not just elected leaders — and widely and generally understood. This is a considerable organizing challenge.
Wisconsin can meet this challenge. We have more than enough intellectual resources, leading firms, progressive labor leadership, dedicated public servants, and good citizens to build a high road economy in our state. But will we?
2 comments:
"What Wisconsin’s workers need is a real strategy for economic development".
No what we need are some baseball bats and ca hones.
I'm going through a cognitive dissonance here.
Everything I see from both Oshkosh and Appleton in their schemes to get more TIF money is to sell $10.00 cups of coffee and $15.00 martinis to retirees.
If what is needed is a sustainable manufacturing base with all the provisions indicated in the T2T piece above (and I agree), what do Tony's students think they will be doing when the Big Change comes? Supervising their high school graduating classmates who have equivalent muscle and brains but no more or less than themselves?
Make no mistake: a change in the focus on what productivity means effects all. With respect for actual productive activity will come a welcome decrease in education as a commodity.
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