Wisconsin Jobs Increase Again While The Supply Of Workers Shrinks, DWD Reports

By Erik Gunn, Wisconsin Examiner

October 21, 2022

Wisconsin employers added 7,000 jobs in September, bringing the total number of new jobs to 63,000 in the last year, the state labor department reported Thursday.

With that, the state has recovered “99% of the jobs lost during the COVID recession,” said Dennis Winters, chief economist at the Department of Workforce Development, in a monthly briefing on the state’s jobs picture.

At the same time, the survey of households that the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts each month found that there were 11,600 fewer people in Wisconsin who said they were either working or seeking a job in September compared with the previous month, and 21,500 fewer than a year ago.

That doesn’t spell layoffs. New and continuing unemployment claims are at or near record lows, and the state’s unemployment rate, 3.2% has edged up slightly, but remains “near historic lows” and below the national unemployment rate of 3.5%, Winters said.

“We’ve got just about everybody that wants to work that can work,” Winters said. The difficulty that employers have had in filling job openings continue to be driven by demographics, and in that respect, Wisconsin isn’t alone.

“This is true for all occupations across all geographies, not only in Wisconsin but the Upper Midwest,” Winters said.

The trend extends through developed countries as well as reaching other parts of the world, he added.

“We keep continuing to focus on trying to find everybody we can and get everybody trained up to the max and get them into the workforce,” Winters said.

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