Wisconsin Workers Have the Power as Employers Struggle to Fill Positions

Tuesday, October 11th, 2022 -- 12:00 PM

(By Leah Treidler, Wisconsin Public Radio) Despite low unemployment and high labor force participation, Wisconsin employers are struggling to fill hundreds of thousands of jobs.

According to Leah Treidler of Wisconsin Public Radio, that's given employees more power to bargain for what they want, like remote work, better benefits and higher wages.

"Wisconsin's labor force is more engaged than the rest of the country, and I don't care how you measure it. Whether it's by gender or ethnicity, our labor force participation rates are higher than the U.S," Wisconsin Department of Revenue Chief Economist John Koskinen said at an economic outlook roundtable last week.

Labor force participation in August fell slightly to 65.9 percent, but still topped the national rate of 62.4 percent, according to data from the state's Department of Revenue. Wisconsin's labor participation rate is the sixth highest in the country, Koskinen said, partially because younger people in the state are far more likely to take on jobs here.

Unemployment is also low, he said. According to DOR data, the unemployment rate in August was 3.1 percent, below the national rate of 3.7 percent. But despite high participation, there are still over 200,000 job openings in the state, according to Koskinen.

"If we were to take the number of people that we have job openings for and subtract from that the number of people that are unemployed, we'd have 112,000 more job openings than we have people to fill them," Koskinen said. "That's twice the level we saw before the pandemic. So if we had every unemployed person in the right skill set in the right location in the right industry, we would still be short 112,000 people."

According to a 2016 UW-Madison study, one of the long-term drivers of Wisconsin's labor shortage is an aging population. A more recent analysis of Census data showed that, based on current trends, the number of working-age Wisconsin residents will fall by about 130,000 by 2030.

A combination of people leaving the state and a lack of people moving into the state is also a factor, it said, along with a "skill mismatch." That means not enough people have the right skills or education for certain jobs.

That shortage, which has become more acute during the pandemic, has led to high demand for workers and low rates of layoffs, said Dr. Nicholas Jolly, an economics professor at Marquette University.

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