News of the Day

The rate at which Wisconsin’s “prime working age” adults are either working or looking for work is among the best in the country, according to a recent report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.

Economists describe prime working age as individuals between 25 and 54 years old because that demographic typically has the highest labor force participation rates. Those rates measure the share of the population that’s working or seeking jobs.

In 2021, Wisconsin had the fifth-highest labor force participation rate in the country for prime working age women and the ninth highest for prime working age men, the UW-Extension report said.

“It speaks a lot to our work ethic,” said Matt Kures, the report’s author and a community economic development specialist for UW-Extension. “Traditionally, we have had high participation rates and I think that’s just kind of ingrained in us.”

He said overall annualized labor force participation data for 2022 is still preliminary. But the share of the state’s population that’s considered prime working age has been declining since around 2000 as both the 55- to 64-year-old and 65-plus demographics have been increasing, according to research from Kures.

For example, people 55 and older made up 21.6 percent of the state’s population in 2000. By 2021, they made up 32 percent. During the same period, prime working age Wisconsinites went from representing 43.1 percent of the population to 37.1 percent, while the state’s overall labor force participation rate has been trending downward.

“One of the biggest factors pushing our overall participation rate down is just our aging demographics,” Kures said. “That explains a very large share of the overall decline in our participation rates.”

A group of Republican state lawmakers is introducing a plan that they say would force Wisconsin hospitals to be more transparent about how much they’re charging for procedures.

The plan introduced by state Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and other GOP lawmakers would require hospitals to keep a list on their website of 300 “shoppable services,” or nonemergency procedures they provide. The plan would ban hospitals from charging for the information or requiring people to set up user accounts to read it.

The state’s Department of Health Services would be in charge of enforcing the requirement. If hospitals don’t comply, DHS could fine smaller facilities up to $600 per day. Larger hospitals, those with more than 550 beds, could get hit with daily fines of $10,000.

“Health care is the only thing Wisconsinites purchase that we don’t know the price of beforehand,” Felzkowski said Wednesday at a state Capitol news conference introducing the plan. “And that has to change.”

Felzkowski argued the new state requirement is necessary because the federal government isn’t enforcing compliance with its health transparency requirement.

“It’s time that the state stepped up and started looking out for our constituents around the cost of health care,” Felzkowski said. “And that’s what this bill does.”

Felzkowski said the proposal could be used by employers to comparison shop insurance plans for their workers. She said it could also be used by people to compare prices for procedures, like a mammogram.

With a single vote Tuesday, Republicans lawmakers dramatically reshaped Governor Tony Evers’ proposed budget.

GOP members of the Legislature’s budget committee voted to remove 545 proposals from the governor’s proposed two-year spending plan, ranging from a new paid family leave program to a deal to fund upgrades to the Milwaukee Brewers stadium. Other Evers budget initiatives rejected by Republicans Tuesday include an expansion of Medicaid, the legalization of marijuana and an enrollment freeze in the state’s voucher school program.

This is Evers’ third proposed budget since becoming governor in 2019, and the third time Republicans have started deliberations by rejecting a long list of the governor’s initiatives.

Joe Heim, a professor emeritus of political science, said the process isn’t surprising to budget observers at this point. “When you’ve got a Democratic governor and a Republican Legislature, you expect certain things,” Heim said. “There are things in (Evers’) budget that I think he put in to satisfy certain constituencies. You know, he just had an election. So he had certain promises that he would make knowing fully well that this stuff is going to disappear.”

Also on Tuesday, Republicans voted to build the budget from “base,” meaning they will add spending to the budget Republicans passed and Evers signed two years ago rather than the one he proposed to the Legislature in February. A handful of Democrats also supported that budget in both houses of the Legislature.

“The bottom line is we are building off base a budget that was bipartisan for the first time since 2007,” said Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc.

While Republicans have spent the past several months criticizing Evers’ budget, Tuesday marked the first time they took votes on pieces of the budget themselves. Deals on bigger issues — like school funding — could come together later this month.

“If the past is prologue, they will eventually come to somewhat of an agreement, at least the more contentious issues,” Heim said. “Most observers that I’ve talked to seem to think that this is actually going to get done by the end of June.”

Nearly 40 years ago, in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that courts should defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute as long as that interpretation is reasonable. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider its ruling in Chevron.

The question comes to the court in a case brought by a group of commercial fishing companies. They challenged a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that requires the fishing industry to pay for the costs of observers who monitor compliance with fishery management plans.

Relying on Chevron, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the companies’ challenge to the rule. Judge Judith Rogers explained that although federal fishery law makes clear that the government can require fishing boats to carry monitors, it does not specifically address who must pay for the monitors. Because the NMFS’s interpretation of federal fishery law as authorizing industry-funded monitors was a reasonable one, Rogers concluded, the court should defer to that interpretation.

The fishing companies came to the Supreme Court in November, asking the justices both to weigh in on their challenge to the rule and to overrule Chevron (or, the petition suggested, clarify that when a law does not address “controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute,” there is no ambiguity in the statute, and therefore no deference is required).

Some members of the court’s conservative majority have been critical of the Chevron doctrine in recent years. Justice Clarence Thomas has been among the doctrine’s most vocal critics, arguing in a concurring opinion in 2015 that Chevron deference “wrests from Courts the ultimate interpretative authority ‘to say what the law is,’ and hands it over to” the executive branch. He has been joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who in a dissent from the denial of review last fall argued that the court “should acknowledge forthrightly that Chevron did not undo, and could not have undone, the judicial duty to provide an independent judgment of the law’s meaning in the cases that come before the Nation’s courts.”

The case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, is likely to be argued in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in 2024. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the case, presumably because she participated in the oral argument in the case while she was a judge on the D.C. Circuit.

The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD) today announced record participation in its Youth Apprenticeship (YA) programs, with 8,357 high-school juniors and seniors pursuing paid, on-the-job training in fields, including manufacturing, health, science, agriculture and more. This record number represents 30% more youth apprentices than the 2021-2022 school year.

DWD’s YA program is an earn-while-you-learn model that connects apprentices with high-skill, high-wage employment with employers across the state. In addition to learning the hands-on skills of the occupation from the employer, youth apprentices gain occupation-specific knowledge through an area technical college or private training center in addition to completing their high-school coursework. A key component of apprenticeship is employment and there is no apprenticeship without a respective job opening.

The record-high total of 8,357 youth apprentices in the 2022-2023 school year surpassed the previous record of 6,392 apprentices for the 2021-2022 school year, continuing a year-over-year, record-breaking trend. In addition, YA had a record 5,719 employers, training and giving these students work opportunities in a variety of industries.

YA pathways with the highest participation are: manufacturing, 1,509; health science, 1,393; agriculture, food and natural resources, 1,048; architecture and construction, 1,039; and marketing, 1,015.

Beyond the high participation in the program’s current pathways, YA continues to evolve to meet the needs of both employers and students. The program recently added 14 new pathways and has plans to create pathways in five broad program areas: education and training; business management and administration; government and public administration; human services; and law, public safety, corrections, and security. The new YA occupational pathways will be completed by the fall of 2024.

To learn more about Wisconsin Apprenticeship, visit WisconsinApprenticeship.com.

Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced for the period, rose at a 1.1% annualized pace in the first quarter, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The growth rate followed a fourth quarter in which GDP climbed 2.6%, part of a year that saw a 2.1% increase.

The report also showed that the personal consumption expenditures price index, an inflation measure that the Federal Reserve follows closely, increased 4.2%. Stripping out food and energy, core PCE rose 4.9%, compared to the previous increase of 4.4%.

The slowdown in growth came due to a decline in private inventory investment and a deceleration in nonresidential fixed investment, the report said. The inventory slowdown took 2.26 percentage points off the headline number.

Consumer spending as measured by personal consumption expenditures increased 3.7% and exports were up 4.8%. Gross private domestic investment tumbled 12.5%.

“The U.S. economy is likely at an inflection point as consumer spending has softened in recent months,” said Jeffrey Roach, chief economist at LPL Financial. “The backward nature of the GDP report is possibly misleading for markets as we know consumers were still spending in January but since March, have pulled back as consumers are getting more pessimistic about the future.”

Wisconsin’s only oil refinery is on track to be fully operational in June after a $1.2 billion effort to rebuild the facility five years following an explosion that injured three dozen workers.

The refinery is now owned by Calgary-based Cenovus Energy. Cenovus said Wednesday the refinery is on track to resume full operations by the end of June, Wisconsin Public Radio reported. The cost to rebuild the refinery tripled from initial projections, and it took years longer than expected due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The refinery typically produces gasoline, diesel and asphalt with a capacity of roughly 50,000 barrels per day. Around 350 employees will now work at the refinery, which previously employed about 200 workers.

Wisconsin often has among the highest labor force participation rates in the country for “prime working age” residents, according to a recent UW-Madison report.

The labor force participation rate is typically based on the percentage of workers over age 16 that are either employed or unemployed and actively seeking work, the report shows. But a researcher with the university’s Division of Extension notes this measure can be calculated for “a variety of demographic characteristics.”

For residents between the ages of 25 and 54, Wisconsin is frequently among the top 10 U.S. states for labor force participation on an annual basis, the report found. In 2021, that rate was 88.9 percent for men and 83.1 percent for women in the state — the ninth and fifth highest rates in the country, respectively.

The report also explores county-level prime working age labor force participation. But the author notes margins of error in U.S. Census Bureau data used to calculate these figures at the county level “make geographic comparisons somewhat challenging.” The report aims to avoid this issue by analyzing if a county’s rate has a statistically significant difference from national rates.

“Calculating significant differences (at a 90% confidence level) shows variations in [labor force participation rates] for both men and women within states and across regions,” author Matt Kures wrote.

For prime working age men, 42 counties in the state have labor force participation rates above the national rate of 86.4 percent, while 15 counties have a lower rate and another 15 don’t have a statistically significant difference. The counties with a lower rate include: Bayfield, Burnett, Washburn, Rusk, Chippewa, Forest, Menominee, Jackson, Vernon, Crawford, Juneau, Adams, Waushara, Dodge and Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, 51 counties in the state have participation rates for women that are above the national average, and just two counties have lower rates, the report shows.

People in Wisconsin would receive fewer unemployment benefits and face stricter qualification requirements under a package of bills slated for votes in the state Assembly on Tuesday.

The eight Republican-backed measures follow a statewide April election in which more than three-quarters of voters supported a nonbinding ballot question saying they believe able-bodied adults should have to look for work to receive government assistance.

Unemployment recipients in Wisconsin already must perform four work-search activities each week. Under the bills that will be voted on Tuesday, employers would be able to report recipients who decline or don’t show up to an interview. People who have been reported multiple times and don’t have good reasons for declining or missing interviews could have their benefits rescinded.

Another measure would tie the number of weeks someone can receive unemployment benefits to the statewide unemployment rate. With current rates under 3%, recipients would be limited to 14 weeks of benefits. The existing standard of 26 weeks of benefits would only apply if rates rise above 9%, which hasn’t happened since the 2008 financial crisis.

Other proposals in the package would enact stricter identity verification checks for unemployment benefits, prohibit local governments from using taxpayer money to create guaranteed income programs and require the Department of Health Services to review every six months the eligibility of people participating in Medicaid programs reserved for low-income people, family caretakers and pregnant women.

The Wisconsin Towns Association is calling on lawmakers to fund a statewide assessment of small bridges. The ask comes after a century-old creek crossing in northern La Crosse County collapsed under a fertilizer truck April 15.

Mike Koles, executive director of the Wisconsin Towns Association, said federal regulations require an inventory and regular safety assessments of bridges over 20 feet. But there are no requirements for structures under that length.

Koles estimates there are up to 25,000 of them across the state. The Towns Association is asking the state Legislature to include funding for a statewide inventory and safety assessment of these crossing, which Koles said states like Minnesota and South Dakota have already completed.

“That’s going to identify how big of a problem this is, where the problem is,” he said.

Koles said his organization is also asking state lawmakers to make supplemental funding through the local road improvement program a permanent part of the budget. He said local communities rely on these programs to pay for large construction projects. And he said rural communities could use financial help paying for grant writers to prepare their applications.