Wisconsin companies will pay 8.47 percent less in worker’s compensation insurance rates starting October 1, 2022, giving a boost to businesses​ around the state, the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development reported.

The 2022 rate decrease, approved by the Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance, marks the seventh year in a row worker’s compensation insurance premiums have declined in Wisconsin. The latest reduction in premiums is expected to save Wisconsin employers some $146 million.

“Strong partnerships among employers, workers, training providers, and other stakeholders are helping to keep employees safe and healthy on the job,” said DWD Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek. “Wisconsin’s proactive, collaborative approach is delivering real benefits for workers and their families while supporting the competitiveness of employers statewide.”

Worker’s compensation insurance rates are adjusted annually by a committee of actuaries from members of the Wisconsin Compensation Rating Bureau. This independent body examines and selects the methodology and trends that produce the proposed rate adjustment, which is then reviewed and approved by the Wisconsin Commissioner of Insurance. While the overall rate level will decrease by 8.47 percent, the impact to policyholders will vary based on specific circumstances.

Dr. Fred Prehn, the former head of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, can continue to serve on the policy-making board now that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled it’s legal for him to remain.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued to remove Prehn from the NRB in August. The board’s former chair has refused to step down from the policy-making body after his six-year term expired in May last year. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker appointed Prehn in 2015.

“(T)he expiration of Prehn’s term on the DNR Board does not create a vacancy. Prehn lawfully retains his position on the DNR Board as a holdover,” wrote Chief Justice Annette Ziegler for the majority. “Therefore, the Governor cannot make a provisional appointment to replace Prehn.”

The court found a vacancy is only created when a person dies, resigns, or is removed for cause.

Prehn’s decision to stay on the board has blocked Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ appointee Sandy Nass from taking a seat. Evers appointed Nass and Sharon Adams to the board in April of last year to fill vacancies left by members whose terms expired, including Prehn.

Prehn could remain on the board for years if Republican lawmakers refuse to confirm Evers’ appointee. The state Senate adjourned its latest session earlier this year without confirming Nass.

Self-insured employers have been fighting the good fight against runaway health costs for their companies and for their workers for decades, without much help from state and national politicians. But a ray of sunshine has emerged: the courts.

A cause-driven law firm, Fairmark Law, has filed a federal class-action law suit in Wisconsin on behalf of self-insured employers and their employees against one of the state’s biggest hospital conglomerates, Advocate Aurora Health. The firm is charging monopolization and price gouging. The David versus Goliath suit was filed in the name of a small company, Uriel Pharmacy based in East Troy, Wisconsin.

The Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) of big hospital corporations and giant health care insurers has increased its rates close to 8% per year over the last two decades. That gouging has had the cumulative effect of raising the cost of care for a family of four to $22,000 to $30,000, depending on which consultant is keeping score.

In contrast, the most astutely managed company health plans have limited inflation to 2% to 3% per year. Total costs for a family can run $12,000 to $14,000 per year. That’s still expensive, but not outrageously so. (Note: The pure medical side of American health can be exemplary.)

That massive cost discrepancy is at the heart of the Fairmark case against Advocate Aurora.

Fairmark looks at the courts as one way to overcome anti-competitive contracting and imbalance of power between smaller payers and the Medical Industrial Complex.

Its Wisconsin case will be buttressed by a recent Rand Corp. analysis that ranks the state 4^th highest in the country in comparison to Medicare payments. Our hospitals charge private companies three times what they pay Medicare.

Advocate Aurora Health has a monster merger in the works with Atrium Health of North Carolina. It’s hard to see any operating synergies between those two distant operations. But the combination would gain leverage for higher prices with the nation’s largest health insurers.

Kohl’s Corporation has entered exclusive negotiations with retail store operator Franchise Group, Inc. over a potential sale of the department store chain, valuing it at nearly $8 billion, the companies said late on Monday. The bid of $60 per share constitutes a premium to Kohl’s closing price of $42.12 on Monday, giving it a market value of about $5.4 billion.

Franchise Group, owner and operator of retail stores such as The Vitamin Shoppe and Buddy’s Home Furnishings, said the companies have entered into a three-week-long exclusive discussion.

“The purpose of the exclusive period is to allow FRG and its financing partners to finalize due diligence and financing arrangements and for the parties to complete the negotiation of binding documentation,” Kohl’s said.

Kohl’s said the deal is subject to board approval and provided no assurance that an agreement would be finalized.

The Wisconsin-based department store chain was under pressure after activist investors Macellum Advisors GP LLC and Engine Capital LP called on Kohl’s earlier this year to sell itself.

The groundswell of organized retail crime is a national issue that risks spreading local law enforcement thin. While the American public sees headlines of smash-and-grab robberies or watches shock-inducing footage of their favorite retailers left ransacked and wrecked, it’s our local police forces that are left to pick up the pieces.

Almost 70 percent of storefronts have reported an increase in theft this past year, and the Coalition of Law Enforcement and Retail estimates that organized retail crime accounts for $45 billion in annual retail losses. In one instance alone in February 2021, a group brazenly grabbed handbags worth $165,000 from the shelves of a Chanel store in New York in a daytime robbery.

Why the sudden spike in crime sprees over the past couple of years? Historically, organized retail crime tends to increase in challenging times. According to U.S. court statistics, retail theft skyrocketed by 16 percent after 9/11 and by 30 percent during the 2008 recession. It’s no surprise that we are seeing a similar, albeit accelerated, trend amid the protracted pandemic and crippling inflation.

But what makes this current organized retail crime wave more pervasive and problematic than ever is where these stolen goods may end up once they are swiped from store shelves. Gone are the days of pawning stolen merchandise on street corners and flea markets; criminals are turning to the anonymity of the internet to peddle their loot. Stolen items are showing up on the virtual marketplaces that consumers traffic on a daily basis, seamlessly fitting in with honest online storefronts and businesses.

That’s why federal legislation such as the Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers, or INFORM Consumers Act, could be a valuable and essential tool. It’s the least Congress can do to support law enforcement online as they continue to work to combat organized retail crime. The bill requires online marketplaces to clearly disclose contact information of certain high-volume, third-party sellers to consumers and provide consumers with ways to report suspicious marketplace activity. The Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general would have authority to enforce the requirements.

Factory activity in the United States last month dropped to its lowest level since July 2020 as supply chain snarls intensified amid a new wave of pandemic-related lockdowns in China, an industry survey said on Monday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its manufacturing index dropped almost 2 percentage points to 55.4 percent in April, against expectations for a modest increase, but still above the 50-percent threshold indicating expansion.

The culprit was a renewed flareup in the supply chain woes that have dogged American factories throughout their recovery from the Covid-19 downturn, and in particular, China’s aggressive moves to stop renewed outbreaks in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities.

“Overseas partners are experiencing Covid-19 impacts, creating a near-term headwind for the US manufacturing community,” said Timothy Fiore, the survey’s chairman. “Fifteen percent of panelists’ general comments expressed concern about their Asian partners’ ability to deliver reliably in the summer months, up from 5 percent in March,” he added.

We Energies wants to raise your rates. Residential customers would see electric bills go up $5 to $6 per month to cover what We Energies calls the largest clean-energy transition in its history, according to our partners at the Milwaukee Business Journal.

The proposed electric rate increases would be 5% to 6%, the company said.

The investment includes $175 million for a solar farm in southwest Wisconsin. It creates nearly as much power as the biggest coal burning unit at the Oak Creek power plant with zero emissions.

It also includes $660 million for two large solar and battery projects in southeast Wisconsin. The company said it also plans to spend $700 million over the next decade to bury power lines and strengthen its delivery against severe weather, the Milwaukee Business Journal reports.

The typical customer’s rate increase will amount to $4 to $8 per month for natural gas. However, the majority of a customer’s gas bill results from therms used rather than the base rate.

A final decision on the rate change is expected later this year.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday adopted Republican-drawn maps for the state Legislature, handing the GOP a victory just weeks after initially approving maps drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

The court reversed itself after the U.S. Supreme Court in March said Evers’ maps were incorrectly adopted, and came just as candidates were about to begin circulating nominating papers to appear on this year’s ballot without being sure of district boundaries.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court had adopted Evers’ map on March 3, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it on March 23. The high court ruled that Evers’ map failed to consider whether a “race-neutral alternative that did not add a seventh majority-black district would deny black voters equal political opportunity.”

Evers told the state Supreme Court it could still adopt his map with some additional analysis, or an alternative with six majority-Black districts. The Republican-controlled Legislature argued that its map should be implemented.

The Wisconsin court, controlled 4-3 by conservatives, sided with the Legislature.

“The maps proposed by the Governor … are racially motivated and, under the Equal Protection Clause, they fail strict scrutiny,” Chief Justice Annette Ziegler wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Patience Roggensack, Rebecca Grassl Bradley and Brian Hagedorn.

The Legislature’s maps, they wrote, “are race neutral” and “comply with the Equal Protection Clause, along with all other application federal and state legal requirements.”

Hagedorn, a conservative swing justice, initially backed Evers’ map but reversed himself once the matter came back before the court. In a separate concurrence, he wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court decision required the state court to adopt a race-neutral map, and the Legislature’s maps “are the only legally compliant maps we received.”

The court’s three liberal justices — Jill Karofsky, Ann Walsh Bradley and Rebecca Dallet — dissented. Karofsky, writing for the minority, said the Legislature’s maps “fare no better than the Governor’s under the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale.”

Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) Secretary Randy Romanski and Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation Secretary and CEO Missy Hughes announced yesterday the creation of the new Wisconsin Agricultural Export Advisory Council (WAXC). This council will help guide the initiatives created through the Wisconsin Initiative for Agricultural Exports (WIAE), a collaborative project between DATCP and WEDC to promote the export of Wisconsin’s agricultural and agribusiness products.

The council includes international trade experts from WEDC and DATCP, state legislators, and agriculture organizations and agribusinesses representing crop, dairy, and meat products. The council will meet at least twice per year, and the first council meeting will take place at 9 a.m. on May 4, 2022 at the WEDC headquarters, 201 West Washington Avenue, Madison, WI 53703. These meetings are open to the public, and are
expected to have virtual attendance options.

Wisconsin agricultural exports reached an all-time high of $3.96 billion in 2021. Through the WIAE, DATCP is working collaboratively with WEDC to build on that momentum by promoting Wisconsin agricultural products in the international marketplace.

Today the United States Postal Service filed notice with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) of price changes to take effect July 10, 2022. The new prices, if approved, include a two-cent increase in the price of a First-Class Mail Forever stamp from 58 cents to 60 cents.

The proposed prices, approved by the Governors of the U.S. Postal Service, would raise First-Class Mail prices approximately 6.5 percent. The proposed Mailing Services price changes include:

Product                                                        Current Prices                Planned Prices

Letters (1 oz.)                                                  58 cents                         60 cents
Letters (metered 1 oz.)                                   53 cents                         57 cents
Letters additional ounce(s)                              20 cents                        24 cents
Domestic Postcards                                       40 cents                        44 cents
International Letter (1 oz.)                              $1.30 cents                  $1.40 cents

The PRC will review the prices before they are scheduled to take effect. The complete Postal Service price filing with prices for all products can be found on the PRC site under the Daily Listings section at prc.gov/dockets/daily.