Wanted to briefly go over last week's release of the "gold standard" Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This covered the time period between March 2017 and March 2018, but just had the overall numbers and information for jobs in large metro areas, as the bigger breakdown of private sector and county-by-county comparisons for all places comes next week. It shows that Wisconsin ended up with 27,159 new jobs in the 12 months covered in that report, not too far off of the year-over-year total of 29,300 that the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development reported back in the Spring (in recent years, Walker’s DWD has often overestimated growth by more than that).
It marks a job growth rate of 0.97%. Not great, but not much different from December’s 12-month increase rate of total jobs of 1.01%. And when compared to the rest of the nation, the story was also familiar for Wisconsin, as we ended up 30th in the US for overall job growth, which makes it the 27th straight quarter that we have been in the bottom half for job growth…or every quarter since Scott Walker’s first budget was signed into law in June 2011.
More locally, the state was in the middle of the pack for Midwestern job growth (4th out of 7) between March 2017 and March 2018. But it looks worse when you look at the longer-range picture, where we drop to 5th for overall job growth in the Midwest in the 7 years since Act 10 was jammed through the Legislature in March 2011
. But hey, we might catch Ohio soon and reach mediocrity, so…yay?
The wage side of the QCEW had a little better news, as Wisconsin’s rate of weekly wage growth for the 1st Quarter of 2018 was up 3.8%, which ranked it 12th in the nation, and beat the 3.7% increase in the US as a whole.
But because the US’s average wage was about $180 more than Wisconsin’s in Q1 2017, the dollar gap actually grew to $184 for Q1 2018. That wage gap was also noticeable for Wisconsin’s largest metro areas when you compare them to most other Midwestern population centers.
Average weekly wage, March 2018
Dane County, Wis $1,144
Waukesha Co., Wis $1,142
Milwaukee Co., Wis $1,096
Chicago area
Lake County, Ill. $1,686
Cook County, Ill. $1,420
DuPage County, Ill. $1,309
Minneapolis area
Hennepin Co., Minn $1,497
Ramsey Co., Minn $1,346
Detroit area
Oakland Co., Mich $1,277
Wayne County, Mich $1,268
Indianapolis area
Marion County, Ind. $1,218
Hamilton Co., Ind. $1,134
Those wage gaps are not a good thing when you’re competing against those areas for talent to locate and stay in your state. And Foxconn will not do a thing to help to close that gap.
In retrospect, I guess I can see why the pre-release of the “gold standard” figures didn’t get much for interest by the state’s media. Subpar job growth and wages have become the norm during the 7 years of WisGOP’s Reign of Error in Wisconsin, and no amount of propaganda released by the Walker Administration/campaign will change that reality. The only thing that changes it is new leadership.
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