A new study from the Wisconsin Policy Forum says that employment in Wisconsin has made a strong comeback four years after a short but sharp drop in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the recovery has not been the same across the state.
The study, which came out Friday, says that the state now has more than 2.92 million jobs, which is 1.2% more than its peak in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic.
But in more than half of Wisconsin’s 72 counties, jobs are still less plentiful in 2023 than they were in 2019.
“When you look at the big picture, there are a lot of very good signs here,” said Joseph Peterangelo, research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum and author of the study. Those good things stand out more when you compare them to the sharp drop in jobs in the first few months of the pandemic.
Federal statistics show that during the long recovery, unemployment has stayed low, at or below 3%, and wages have kept up with inflation.
He said, “But when you look at the details, it’s a very mixed picture.”
Jobs in 2023 haven’t caught up to jobs in 2019 in more than half of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.
“The recovery has also been uneven across the economy,” the report says. “By 2023, most sectors had fully recovered, but some are still down by thousands of jobs.”
From 2019 to 2023, the number of jobs grew the most in a wide range of rural and urban areas. The study says that some of the counties with the fastest job growth were those that are close to the big cities of Chicago and Minnesota’s Twin Cities.
A lot of counties, from Milwaukee County, which is the state’s most urban, to many of its most rural, have also seen unemployment rates fall below what they were in 2019.
The amount of jobs in Milwaukee County, which has the most people in the state, fell by 19,140, or 4%, between 2019 and 2023. The number of people in the county who were working age (15–64) was also 3.9% less in 2023 than it was in 2019, according to figures Peterangelo gave.
But not all areas where unemployment was higher in 2023 than in 2019 lost people of working age. In some areas, jobs went up even though the population went down, while in others, jobs went down even though the number of people of working age went up.
“What’s going on in different places might be different stories,” Peterangelo said.
The study says that the number of people of working age in Kenosha County was 2.4% less in 2023 than it was in 2019. But with 5,700 more jobs, an 8.5% rise, it “is one of the Wisconsin counties that added jobs the fastest.”
The Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development says that more people move into or out of Kenosha County to find work “than in many other Wisconsin counties,” according to a study.
From 2019 to 2023, more than 8,800 jobs were added in Dane County, making it the county with the most job growth.
The study says that between 2019 and 2023, construction jobs grew by 12,000, which was the most of any industry in Wisconsin. It was about the same amount of time that jobs in professional, scientific, and technical services grew, and more than 11,000 more jobs were created in transportation and storage.
The study says that in the whole state, there were about 9,000 fewer manufacturing jobs in 2023 than there were in 2019. But there were big gaps within the manufacturing sector as a whole.
Peterangelo said that over the past five years, jobs have steadily been lost in the paper business. Also, jobs in fabricated metal production dropped from more than 77,000 to 71,000 at the start of the pandemic. They have since gone back up to more than 75,000, which is a big improvement but still less than their previous high point.
One thing that might be worrying is the net loss of manufacturing jobs. However, the report says that “the state’s strong overall employment and wage growth figures may suggest that our economy is diversifying, which could be a strength if it means greater resilience during future economic downturns.”
Wisconsin still has problems with its population, though. The number of people in Wisconsin between the ages of 25 and 54 who were working fell by 133,000, or 5.8%, from 2010 to 2023? During the same time period, that age group grew by 2.8% across the country.
“An aging population, low birth rate, and weak net migration figures have resulted in a shrinking working-age population,” the report says. This could make it harder for the state to get and keep employers.