Wisconsin in full-employment situation less than 2 years after COVID.

We got a clearer picture of Wisconsin’s jobs market with today’s January state jobs report, which showed a state operating near maximum employment at the start of 2022, with job growth stagnating while the rest of the country grew.

Place of Residence Data: Wisconsin's labor force participation rate in January was 66.4%, 4.2 percentage points higher than the national rate of 62.2%. Wisconsin's unemployment rate in January 2022 was 3.0%.

Place of Work Data: Wisconsin total nonfarm jobs decreased from December 2021 to January 2022 by 100, while private-sector jobs decreased by 2,900 over the same time period. From January 2021 to January 2022, Wisconsin added 42,300 nonfarm jobs and 40,100 private sector jobs.

But the January numbers in Wisconsin are important for another reason. Because it re-sets the numbers from the last 12+ months to match up with the information in the “gold standard” QCEW jobs survey.

In addition to the January statewide data, BLS also recently published "benchmarked" estimates for the monthly employment and unemployment data sets covering 2021 and prior years. The benchmarking process is designed to bring the sample-based series into closer alignment with the actual job counts from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW). The QCEW and other data are used to realign the survey data and to recalibrate the estimation model that is then driven by the monthly survey data. The recalibrated model is used with the current survey data to estimate the monthly numbers until the next benchmarking realignment.

When you compare the benchmarked numbers to what was originally in the monthly jobs reports, Wisconsin ends up at a similar amount to what we thought we had (+2,400 overall, -4,900 private sector). But we dug out of the pandemic-induced hole much quicker in the latter half of 2020 than we knew, and didn’t gain as much as we thought we did for the last 12 months.

The benchmarks also reiterated that Wisconsin’s labor force continued to grow in 2021 (although it leveled off after Summer), and those that did enter Wisconsin’s work force found jobs, along with a sizable amount of already-low number of people that were out of work at the start of last year. .

With unemployment down to 3.0% and a participation rate higher than it was two years ago, it underscores that this state may be near “maxed out” in terms of how many employees are available.

Which illustrates that the WMC/WisGOP theory of “employees staying on the sidelines” just isn’t true here. What we need to do is to encourage more people to want to come to Wisconsin to work and start businesses of their own, and having a Legislature that wastes time on chasing the Big Lie and supports anti-maskers instead of funding our schools is not going to get that talent to come here.

I also want to point out that while manufacturing rebounded over the last 12 months with 12,400 jobs added in Wisconsin, and that there’s 3,200 more jobs in construction vs January 2021, that’s more due to the Biden Boom than anything special here.

Rate of job growth, Wis vs US Jan 2021 vs Jan 2022
Manufacturing
Wis. +2.69%
U.S. +3.18%

Construction
Wis. +2.54%
U.S. +2.62

I will point out that both sectors lost jobs in January in Wisconsin (manufacturing -900, construction -700), but we will see if that’s just an odd seasonal blip.

So the Wisconsin jobs market is in a pretty good place, to be sure, and that’s also reflected in our massive budget surplus. But now the tougher work begins on how we continue to grow, and if there’s a better way to grow, and I don’t see how giving even more tax cuts would be the way.