The most brutal economic decline since the Great Depression grinds on, bringing working people little to celebrate this Labor Day, 2010. Since its start in December 2007, the Great Recession has pummeled working people with job losses, long-term unemployment, and housing foreclosures. Banks, saved just two years ago by the American taxpayer, are now turning handsome profits (and paying big bonuses on them), and other corporate reports show a return to profitability as well. But on the indicators that matter most to this nation’s workers, the recession goes on, unrelenting. The nation has lost more than 7.7 million jobs and job growth is glacial. Unemployment hovers at 9.5 percent and underemployment at 16 percent, as high as many workers have ever seen it.

Wisconsin is reeling along with the rest of the nation. Our economic outlook two years ago was weak: construction and manufacturing were already on the decline, the job market was shrinking, and family incomes were falling. Then, in September 2008 the financial crisis sent markets into a tailspin and Wisconsin’s economy lost an average of 16,000 jobs per month for the next half year. Manufacturing and construction plummeted. State government receipts dropped. Communities experienced lay-offs, downsizing, and complete shut-downs. Unemployment in the state nearly doubled.

The State of Working Wisconsin 2010 uses the best and most recent data available to help refine our understanding of exactly how Wisconsin is doing in this recession economy and in the longer term. COWS has released The State of Working Wisconsin biennially since 1996. In this, our eighth edition, the economic picture for working people is as grim as we have ever reported.

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Agency: The Center on Wisconsin Strategy (COWS)
Year: 2010
Download: http://www.cows.org/pdf/rp-soww-10.pdf