Wisconsin Businesses Scrambling to Fill Open Jobs

Wednesday, April 19th, 2023 -- 1:00 PM

(By Joe Schulz, Wisconsin Public Radio) Wisconsin's businesses are scrambling to fill open jobs in a tight labor market, but many people face obstacles that prevent them from joining the workforce.

The federal government defines employment barriers as conditions that make it difficult to work. Those can include child care arrangements, unreliable transportation, mental health issues, a past criminal record or a lack of adequate housing.

Despite those obstacles, Wisconsin’s unemployment rate hit a record low in February at 2.7 percent and nonfarm jobs also hit a new record high of 2,997,400, according to the state Department of Workforce Development.

But the state’s labor force participation rate, a measure of people working or looking for work, has been trending downward since 1997. The state’s labor force participation rate was 64.5 percent in February, down 10 percent from 1997.

While Wisconsin continues to outperform the country as a whole in terms of unemployment and labor force participation, employers still have numerous vacant positions. And, as of last October, the state had 112,000 more job openings than people to fill them.

Republicans in the state Legislature recently unveiled a package of bills aimed at tightening up the state’s unemployment insurance system, which some business groups say could address the labor shortage.

But Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said another approach could be addressing the issues that prevent people from joining the workforce, like child care, transportation and mental health.

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