Here & Now

The monthly U.S.

jobs report out today shows encouraging news for the economy, adding 162,000 jobs, keeping the unemployment rate steady at 4.1%.

In Wisconsin, the state of working Wisconsin is mixed.

According to a report by the same name from the High Road Strategy Center at UW-Madison, Laura Dresser is an economist and associate director at the center.

And Laura, thanks a lot for being here.

I'm delighted to be here.

So how do our job numbers stack up and how have they trended since your last Labor Day report?

Yeah, it's been a really rocky time for the economy is a great report today from the national level.

But on net, the national labor market has barely grown since January of 2025.

And Wisconsin, as of the data that came out last month, Wisconsin's total job base had actually fallen and was slightly below where it had been in January of 2025.

So your report shows median wages have grown steadily.

So part of the mix that we're talking about now, sitting at just over $26 an hour.

But what stands out in that stat.

That stats interesting because the median it's great to see that going up because it's going up faster than inflation.

It's been steadily going up faster than inflation for most of the last ten years, except for 2022, when inflation was really high.

So that's a great stat on that sense.

But there's a lot of disparities hidden underneath the median.

And so we look in the report to see what's going on and some of the gaps between, for example, the lowest wage workers and the highest wage workers continue to shrink a little bit because of the tightness of this labor market and the way that lower wage workers have moved forward in wages faster than higher wage workers.

And there's also some kind of demographic gaps.

Yeah, for sure.

There's a big gender gap in wages.

People are familiar with that, though, over the last 40 years, which we document in this, men's wages have have only risen a little.

Women's wages have come quite substantially up.

So the gender gap is closed, has closed over the last 40 years.

And even over the last little bit.

But other gaps are large and have grown, especially racial gaps.

Black white disparity, Black, Hispanic white disparity has grown quite substantially.

people are hyper focused on, that being inflation.

You say there's concern that inflation could wipe out wage gains of 2026.

How so?

Yeah, that's even true in the the national report from today, inflation the rate of inflation is higher than the rate of wage growth.

This is what happened in 2022.

Wages workers wages went up in nominal terms.

But the cost of living just wiped that right out.

That looks like what we're heading into for 2026.

So while we got a high in 2025 and that's great news, 2026 looks much less likely that that will be a strong gain and possible that it will be a loss because of the high inflation.

As to affordability, you report that 1 in 3 households in Wisconsin cannot afford basic things.

You describe this as as nothing new, but is it about the cost of living per se, or is it about the wages?

Yeah, I think it's really important to see both of those things in balance.

I think when we are are focused on the cost of living, like we see the prices go up, especially recently of energy, gas, utilities.

That makes folks focus on the cost of living.

But in the background, the suppression of wages, the long term kind of under the rates of economic growth, wage stagnation that this nation has had, you know, even this last five years of growth have not gotten us back to to kind of moving ahead as the economy moves ahead.

And if it was the questions of the questions of affordability would be wiped out by having better job.

Laura Dresser we leave Thanks for having me.

As to the rising cost of energy, many people want to