A long-running Labor Day report from one of Wisconsin’s most liberal economic research groups says the state’s job market has stalled after eight years of Gov. Tony Evers’ leadership, even as the rest of the country has flourished.
The High Road Strategy Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, formerly known as COWS, released The State of Working Wisconsin 2026 on Friday. The center is an explicitly left-leaning “think-and-do tank” that advocates higher minimum wages, stronger unions, and more public investment. That makes its latest findings notable: after eight years of a Democrat governor, the group’s own data show Wisconsin lagging the nation on jobs.
Wisconsin had 3,042,900 jobs in July 2026, down from a record 3,051,000 in November 2024. Since January 2025, the state has lost jobs while national employment has continued to grow, though slowly. Unemployment remains low at 3.3 percent but has drifted up from 2.6 percent in 2023. Black unemployment in the first quarter of 2026 was 7.2 percent, nearly three times the 2.3 percent rate for white workers.
“Job growth has ground to a halt, and though wages hit a new high in 2025, high inflation is undermining workers’ wages in 2026,” Laura Dresser, the report’s lead author and associate director of the High Road Strategy Center, told Wisconsin Public Radio. “The (report) still shows some very bright spots, but the clouds are gathering on the economic horizon.”
The report itself is even more blunt in its assessment of the state’s economy.
“Wisconsin’s economy has grown slowly relative to the national economy for years, and now job growth has ground to a halt,” researchers found, noting that from February 2020 to July 2026, Wisconsin added just under 2 percent more jobs, compared with about 4 percent nationally.
Manufacturing remains weaker than before the pandemic, and only construction and leisure and hospitality have outpaced national growth.
The report did find reason for tepid optimisim. The state’s inflation-adjusted median wage reached a record $26.17 an hour in 2025. Lower-wage workers gained faster than higher-wage workers from 2019 to 2025, narrowing wage inequality. Labor force participation remains higher than the national average.
Still, the study’s authors argue those gains are fragile, noting that inflation in 2026 is outrunning wage growth and one in three working families struggles to cover the basics.
Because it is a left-wing organization, it concludes by calling for raising the minimum wage and making it easier to unionize, two policies that have been repeatedly proven to depress job markets.
The center’s recommendations are nothing new, but what is notable is that it is now acknowledging that the state’s labor market has cooled and that Wisconsin has underperformed national job growth for two full terms of Democratic control of the governor’s office.
The report comes as the U.S. Department of Labor announced that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, more than double analyst expectations.
