Today’s Wisconsin Budget Project Blog post summarizes some of the key findings of the new State of Working Wisconsin report issued in conjunction with the Labor Day holiday. These reports, which are issued biennially by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), synthesize a broad range of data relating to recent and longer term Wisconsin trends in employment, worker wages and benefits, and disparities between workers.
For purposes of this blog post, I’ll just draw your attention to a couple of things in the report. First, take a look at the maps on page 4 of the Executive Summary that show the sharp increase over the past decade in poor or low-income children in our state. By showing the increasing percentage of students in each district who qualify for free or reduced price lunches, those maps vividly illustrate the increased challenges facing our state’s schools and also our safety net services. Second, here are a few key findings relating to the working poor and racial disparities:
- More than one of fifth of all Wisconsin workers and over a quarter of African American workers held a poverty-wage job in 2011 (with wages under $10.97 per hour).
- Among those poverty-wage workers, just 23% receive health insurance through their employer and only 20% participate in their employer-provided pension benefit (compared to 63% and 64%, respectively, for people with wages over $10.97/hr.).
- Wisconsin’s 24.9% unemployment rate for African Americans was the worst in the nation.
Read more about the racial disparities, as well as trends in unemployment and income, in today’s Budget Project Blog post. Also take a look at the report’s Executive Summary and see the new online supplement on the COWS website.
Jon Peacock
