The most recent budgets proposed by governors across the country reflect ongoing financial pressures for states as they expect modest revenue growth, rising prices and federal policy changes.

Most governors recommended state budgets for fiscal year 2027 that would essentially keep spending flat from the general funds that pay for most state services. That’s according to the Fiscal Survey of States by the National Association of State Budget Officers. (Forty-six states will begin the 2027 fiscal year in July.) 

The survey of budget leaders found nearly half the states were implementing some form of spending cuts to balance the books. 

In their budget plans, 14 states said they would eliminate vacant positions, four reported hiring freezes and eight reported changed retirement benefits to reduce costs. Four states reported layoffs and cuts in employee benefits.

“While budgets are tightening, states overall remain in a strong fiscal position due to steps taken in recent years to manage spending carefully and build reserves,” Alexis Sturm, director of the Illinois Governor’s Office of Management and Budget and current president of the National Association of State Budget Officers, or NASBO, said in a news release.

The survey found that most states planned to increase the size of their rainy day funds: 25 states project those reserves to grow in fiscal 2027, 10 expect theirs to decrease and 11 states expect no change in dollars unadjusted for inflation. Four states did not report. 

But researchers at The Pew Charitable Trusts earlier this year found that the power of those reserve funds is weakening as states confront rising costs. Pew researchers concluded that the median state in 2025 could fund its operations on reserve funds for 47.8 days — down from a record 54.5 days in fiscal 2024.

States pay for most spending from three primary tax revenues: sales and use taxes, personal income taxes and corporate income taxes. In the recent survey, 29 states reported tax revenues were coming in higher than forecasted for fiscal year 2026. Nine states reported collections were on target, while 11 said their revenues were below expectations. One state did not report on revenue collections and NASBO noted the revenue numbers may change following the April tax season.

In their budgets, governors proposed a mix of tax increases and decreases for the upcoming fiscal year that NASBO says will collectively have a near-zero net impact on general fund revenues. 

With federal stimulus dollars and strong consumer demand, states recorded record revenue growth in fiscal years 2021 and 2022. But NASBO expects more modest growth for state revenues in the coming years with a slower national economy, the impact of state tax cuts and changes in federal tax policy.

“States are continuing to navigate a tighter fiscal environment than they experienced earlier this decade,” Shelby Kerns, executive director of NASBO, said in a statement. “While revenues in most states are meeting or exceeding forecasts, growth remains modest and many states are seeing ongoing spending demands outpace recurring revenue growth in the out-years.” 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

In the eight years that Cindy Veeser has operated her childcare center in the Green Bay suburb of Bellevue, Forever Young, she has provided an essential service — but she has also faced almost constant challenges.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic a few years ago, things got a little easier. Federal pandemic relief funds gave childcare providers like Veeser a new safety net — support and stability that they hadn’t known previously.

In Wisconsin the money went to thousands of providers, including Veeser, through Child Care Counts, a $20 million-a-month childcare stabilization fund that paid providers a monthly stipend.

The money helped childcare centers stay open and increase pay for childcare teachers, all without increasing costs for the parents depending on childcare so they could work.

“Federal stabilization funding prevented system collapse, supporting 5,762 programs, 75,740 educators, and more than 430,000 children, while helping reverse a decade long decline in licensed child care,” the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association states in a report issued in May.

“It made everything possible,” Veeser says of Child Care Counts. “My teachers were getting paid a little bit closer to what they should have been making at that time.”

The money didn’t just go to wages. “There wasn’t one thing that it didn’t help cover,” Veeser says.

At the end of this month, however, providers will lose the last vestige of that support. One year of “bridge” funding from the 2025-27 Wisconsin state budget ends June 30, and childcare providers across Wisconsin are unsure what happens next.

“We’re holding things together the best we can now,” Veeser says. “I just see us falling behind.”

One in four centers could close

More than a year ago one out of four Wisconsin provides told researchers that without Child Care Counts funding they could close down entirely.

More than one in three said they would probably reduce the number of hours they could provide child care. And nearly three out of four said they would have to increase the fees they charge parents.

The survey results were reported in March 2025 by the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty. At the time, Wisconsin child care experts were looking ahead to June 2025, when the federal funds that paid for Child Care Counts would run out.

Providers, advocates, Gov. Tony Evers and Democrats in the Legislature had hoped for $480 million in the 2025-27 state budget to continue the stabilization program. What they got was less than 25% of that: $110 million for one year of stabilization funds that ends June 30.

WECA’s May report looked to the 2025 UW survey to forecast what could follow, and solicited new comments from providers.

“I believe that the numbers we reported on, which are the most recent data we have, are going to be much higher in reality,” says Paula Drew, WECA’s director of early care and education policy and research.

“Every provider is talking about the cost of what they’re paying for everything.” in comments submitted to WECA, Drew says. “Many, many, many of them said, ‘I will price parents out and I will likely close,’ or ‘I’m planning on closing because there’s no way I can pay my teachers less.’”

Increased fees and families dropping out

As fees rise, some families drop out of childcare programs. “There’s a huge, growing trend of under-enrollment due to parents not being able to afford the increases that they already have in tuition,” Drew says.

In The Beginning Child Care and Preschool operates centers in Boscobel, Prairie du Chien and Dodgeville, each licensed for 50 children.

“Child Care Counts was a huge difference in our operations,” says director and owner Beth Markut. “We were able to give the staff a minimum of a $2-an-hour raise. We were able to afford new supplies. It was a game changer for us.”

It also helped Markut and her husband, Patrick, open the center in Dodgeville, where they live, in 2023.  “I don’t know if we would have done that if we hadn’t had Child Care Counts, but my guess is probably not,” Markut says.

When Wisconsin cut Child Care Counts payments in half in 2023, In The Beginning increased tuition by 2.5% to 3%, Markut says, and she expects a similar increase after the bridge payments end.

In The Beginning’s increases have been modest compared with those in a state survey, which reported increases for infant care ranging from 11% to 14%, according to WECA.

Nevertheless, Markut says, “I’ve had four families leave our Dodgeville center because it’s cheaper for them just to stay at home” instead of both parents working.

Markut says she’s confident that In The Beginning can keep operating, but she also hopes that lawmakers will come around to the need for ongoing childcare support.

“I don’t think they understand what our profession does through day in and day out,” she says. “If they really understood they would support us, but they don’t. It doesn’t just affect us, it affects the broader economy.”

Shelly Boelter has operated a family child care program in the community of Hager City in northwestern Wisconsin for 23 years.

The family care license is limited to eight children at a time. Boelter built her home with the lower level as childcare space designed into it from the start. “When I was 12, this was what I dreamed of doing,” she says.

Child Care Counts enabled her to take a better wage, cover expenses and put some money away for retirement. That ended when the stabilization stipend was reduced.

To keep going, “I’ll be spending less on things that we could use, to try to just keep it affordable,” Boelter says.

She says she tries to avoid raising rates for families who already have children enrolled, however, because “I don’t want money to be an issue for them to leave.”

As a result, fees vary from one family to another. In the coming months, she expects to raise her rates for new clients, however. “Probably a 25% increase would not be unrealistic,” Boelter says.

She would need even higher increases to fully cover escalating costs, “but families would not be able to afford it,” she says. “I have some families with three children here. They can’t afford that cost for themselves and actually make a living, either.”

‘It’s going to get worse’

With the bridge funding ending and a significant number of programs at risk of  shutting down, advocates say their focus now is on the 2027 state budget, which will be hammered out by  a new governor and a new  state Legislature.

And the childcare economy is likely to become even more precarious.

“The stabilization funding in Wisconsin did some really remarkable things, and it’s really, really sad that we’re just going to see those things roll back,” Drew says.

“There’s a lot of different ways to approach the next budget,” says Ruth Schmidt, WECA executive director — from a new system of direct payments like Child Care Counts to new tax policies or tapping a revenue source, such as legalizing cannabis and then taxing it as a dedicated childcare funding stream.

“The bottom line is, this all is revenue. There’s no way to fix childcare to make it affordable for families, to make it stable within an economy without paying for it,” Schmidt says.

“So, is it going to get worse? We anticipate it’s going to get worse,” she says. “We anticipate it getting significantly worse. And every possible strategy needs money. We can’t just rely on providers to continue to sort of take this on their backs, and it’s not good for them, and it’s not good for kids and families.”

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The Wisconsin Legislature’s budget committee authorized $7 million in state funds Tuesday so that a state agency that supports Wisconsinites with disabilities entering the workforce can draw down a waiting list of more than 7,000 people.

The Joint Finance Committee voted unanimously for the funding, but members first argued over why the panel didn’t act sooner to provide the money.

The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development reported in November that it faced a shortfall under the current state budget.

For people with disabilities who are seeking work, DVR provides career services including training as well as technical assistance for employers. The agency typically works with about 19,000 clients at a time, according to DWD. DVR receives federal funds to cover 78.7% of its annual costs, with the state required to cover the remaining 21.3% under federal law.

The 2025-27 state budget added $3.8 million for the agency, bringing state funding to $21.3 million, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.

In November, the agency announced it was $4.6 million short of what was needed for the 2025-26 fiscal year. Because of that shortfall, the agency instituted a waiting list for people needing the DVR’s services.

“While we’ve been able to support existing program participants, all new applicants have been forced to wait for services, leaving over 7,600 Wisconsinites with disabilities currently on the waitlist to receive career services,” said DWD Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek in a statement Tuesday from the department. About 1,000 people seeking services are added to the waitlist each month, according to DWD.

DWD asked the finance committee for $4.6 million for the budget’s first 12 months, 2025-26, and another $6.4 million for the second 12 months, 2026-27.

Tuesday, the budget committee’s Republican majority on a 4-11 vote rejected a bid by the committee’s four Democrats to honor that request.

“It just stuns me that this committee wouldn’t take every opportunity to make sure that we have a zero waitlist opportunity so that people with disabilities can enter the workforce, pay taxes, and contribute to our economy,” said state Rep. Deb Andraca (D-Whitefish Bay) after the vote. “Are we really saving money by preventing people from working and not doing everything we can so that there’s no waitlist for this program?”

Instead, the majority proposed a $600,000 appropriation for the first year, which ends June 30, and the full $6.4 million sought for the second year. The Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected the appropriation would enable the waitlist to be closed by the end of June 2027. The proposal passed 15-0.

The funds were made possible in part because a $20 million appropriation for dairy farm aid that passed the Senate died in the Assembly, said Sen. Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond).

DWD will draw down the waitlist by first giving priority to people with the most serious disabilities, followed by people with less severe but significant disabilities and finally people whose disabilities do not seriously limit their functional capacity or require people with multiple services.

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The racial wealth gap is widening as many workers of color go without retirement savings.

The median wealth gap between Black and Hispanic families and white families expanded by about $50,000 between 2019 and 2022, according to research from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The typical white family had $240,000 more wealth in 2022 than the typical Black family and $223,000 more than the typical Hispanic family.

Much of that disparity is caused by white families saving more for retirement than members of other racial and ethnic groups, Pew said. Retirement savings, not home equity, is  the largest driver of American household wealth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

To help close the racial wealth gap and ensure more people save for retirement, Pew has been advocating for the creation of state and city-sponsored automatic retirement programs to help cover the more than 50 million Americans who don’t have retirement plans through work.

Those programs, called automatic Individual Retirement Accounts, or IRAs, have been growing in popularity: More than 1.2 million workers across the 15 states with active programs have collectively saved $3 billion for retirement through state-sponsored plans, according to tracking from the Georgetown University Center for Retirement Initiatives.

Minnesota recently launched its auto-IRA program that aims to cover workers at all employers with five or more employees. Hawaii’s program is set to launch this year, with Washington state starting its plan next year.

Those programs often capture lower-income workers who tend to be Black and Hispanic, said John Scott, director of Pew’s retirement savings project.

“I think these programs are doing what they’re supposed to do, which is really reaching those workers who have their access to retirement benefits cut off just by virtue of where they work,” he said.

 

Auto-IRA programs require most employers without retirement offerings to set up payroll deductions for their workers, but do not require any employer match. Employees are automatically enrolled, but can choose to opt out, leading to higher participation rates than if workers were required to opt in to save with the plans.

Employees often contribute post-tax earnings to Roth IRAs, which means they can generally withdraw all or part of their contributions (but not investment returns) without penalties or taxes. That allows workers to not only start building retirement accounts, but to save up for unexpected or emergency expenses, Scott said.

That may also help states persuade workers to stay enrolled in automatic retirement plans.

Georgetown’s tracking shows about 35% of California participants opted out of that state program, while more than 37% opted out of the Illinois program.

In addition to a formal survey, Pew hosted an online discussion to ask Black, Hispanic, Asian American/Pacific Islander, and Native American/Indigenous workers about their views on wealth. Many of those workers did not view wealth in terms of the classic definition of assets minus debts. They instead prioritized financial security, which they saw as a more important goal than simply building wealth.

“What came through in these comments was that wealth to them is really security, and security in the sense of I have some certainty in my life about the income that’s coming in and the bills that have to be paid,” Scott said. “And I don’t really have to wonder if I’m going to have enough at the end of the month after paying off everything that I owe.”

While many people argue against allowing any withdrawals from retirement accounts before workers hit retirement age, Scott said more flexible programs such as the state-sponsored auto-IRAs provide workers with more security.

“You have to meet people where they are,” he said. “And the reality is that if we’re going to ask people to save for the long term, we need to help them build that resilience for the short term.”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

More than 800 nurses at a Madison hospital owned by a national nonprofit group will vote in the coming weeks on whether to join a union.

The organizing campaign at St. Mary’s Hospital is one of the largest in recent memory in Wisconsin.

In a statement earlier this month, a spokesperson said the hospital’s parent organization, SSM Health, “respects the right of its employees” to freely choose union representation. Nurses and the Service Employees International Union say the hospital’s management has responded with stiff opposition.

Union supporters are planning a rally Thursday afternoon in front of the hospital, with U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) among the featured speakers.

“There’s a national crisis facing both our healthcare system and the nursing workforce,” Pocan said in a statement issued Tuesday announcing the event. “St. Mary’s nurses are trying to address this crisis right here in our community by having a strong voice for better staffing and retention. SSM should respect their freedom to vote in a fair union election without any pressure campaign.”

The union election, supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, will be the largest such vote in recent memory in Wisconsin. A date for the election hasn’t yet been set, but it could be announced as early as this week.

It comes amid a rising interest in unions among healthcare workers — one that coincides with the growth of increasingly concentrated multistate healthcare networks, including nonprofit organizations.

“We’re seeing more union elections, we’re seeing more petitions for recognition of unions as well,” said Dr. Ahmed Ahmed, a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, in a panel discussion earlier this month conducted by Wisconsin Health News.

With mergers and consolidations, hospitals and health systems have grown larger and larger. Labor costs are their biggest expense, and in trying to trim those costs, they’re increasing caseloads and reducing the time patients have with their providers, Ahmed said. Healthcare workers are turning to unions in search of “one collective voice that is able to govern and be able to bargain for those things.”

Centralized decision-making

Supporters of the St. Mary’s union campaign say that concentration is one of the reasons they’re organizing. Centralized decision-making at the Missouri headquarters of the parent organization have felt to some like a corporate takeover.

“There have been a lot more directives from corporate headquarters in St. Louis,” said Josh Taylor, a nurse in the hospital’s inpatient behavioral health unit.

St. Mary’s was one of several hospitals and healthcare facilities established by nuns from Europe and sponsored by Roman Catholic congregations in the 19th century. The facilities were only loosely connected until 1986 when the corporate structure changed with the creation of SSM Health, according to the SSM Health website.

SSM Health had been sponsored by the Franciscan Sisters of Mary until 2013, when sponsorship shifted to a new corporate entity, SSM Health Ministries, while remaining part of the Roman Catholic church.

SSM Health is headquartered in St. Louis and operates in four states — Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and Oklahoma — where it runs 24 hospitals and more than 540 other facilities, including doctor’s offices, outpatient services, home care and hospice programs.

According to SSM’s annual financial statements, SSM Health had $12.7 billion in revenues in 2025 and ended the year with a balance of $484 million in net revenue over expenses.

In 2014 SSM Health began applying its name to all of the healthcare facilities in its network.  It also consolidated its business operations including human resources, finance, strategy and planning and marketing and communications.

With those changes, nurses who are supporting unionizing say that decision-making on day-to-day policies and practices has moved farther away.

“We watched our personalized policies for our hospital disappear,” said Lynette Willsey-Schmidt, a labor and delivery nurse who has worked at St. Mary’s for more than 11 years.

Employee councils called ineffective

Willsey-Schmidt said labor and delivery nurses along with the doctors in the department had developed a series of practices to reduce intervention during births where risks and complications were lower. Those practices were welcomed by patients, she said.

But as SSM Health took charge of policymaking, “we were told we can’t do that anymore,” Willsey-Schmidt said, because those policies didn’t exist elsewhere in the SSM Health system.

Taylor said that while employee councils are supposed to relay feedback from the floor to upper management, they haven’t been effective.

“I’ve been on the unit councils,” he said. “We have tried the normal routes to bring our concerns to the table. We are heard, but nothing is acted on.”

When employees have raised concerns, “We’re told, ‘This is how it is. This is how all the hospitals have to do it,’” Taylor said.

Morgan Espich, an inpatient medical and surgical nurse, said the hospital recently purchased and began requiring nurses to use a new brand of intravenous pumps, different from what they had been using. She and her coworkers had been happy with the previous models, Espich said, and no one explained the reason for the change. “We just had to get new ones that no one asked for,” she recalled.

In addition, the hospital staff has to keep some of the older IV pumps on hand, said Carrie Schrank, an intermediate care trauma nurse, to substitute for the new pumps when they malfunction.

Nurses contend staffing levels have left employees straining to cover all their responsibilities, while nurses have been told to improve productivity.

“Productivity should be about patients’ outcomes,” Willsey-Schmidt said.

Consultants who visited earlier this year recommended ways to reduce staffing, but Schrank said their recommendations didn’t address how acutely ill some patients are.

“The days we’re busy, we go home and wonder, did I do enough?” Espich said.

Hospital stance — respect or intimidation?

SSM Health released a statement earlier this month in response to the Wisconsin Examiner’s submission of specific questions about the union campaign as well as a request for an interview.

“At SSM Health, we work hard to cultivate a supportive and collaborative work environment where every employee is treated with respect and compassion,” said the statement, delivered by Kim Sveum, SSM Health regional director of communications.

“We value our high-quality patient-centered care and place of healing.  We strive to ensure that our team thrives so that they can do their best work in realizing our Mission to provide exceptional patient care.”

The statement concluded, “SSM Health respects the right of its employees to make a free and informed choice as to whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.”

Union organizers say that there have been extensive messages posted on employee bulletin boards disparaging unions and the SEIU and emphasizing employees’ right to decline to sign a union authorization card.

“They have been constantly intimidating staff,” Schrank said.

Employees typically attach their work badges to a retractable line coiled up in a holder called a badge reel that can be clipped to a lapel or pocket. When they made their campaign public, pro-union nurses began using a customized badge reel with an emblem, “St. Mary’s Nurses United.”

Supervisors have ordered employees to remove those badge reels. Espich and other nurses said they have been told that “this is soliciting” against hospital policy, and that nurses who don’t remove the badge reel would be sent home without pay for the day.

“With this union-busting, though, we’re all fired up even more,” Espich said.

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The announcement that Cargill is closing its Menomonee Valley plant and laying off 221 packinghouse workers is just the latest blow to Milwaukee’s industrial working class. It marks the end of more than 150 years of meatpacking in the Menomonee Valley. It is a cautionary tale illustrating how huge, highly concentrated industries dominate the United States economy to the detriment of workers, family farmers and consumers. 

Meatpacking was one of Milwaukee’s leading industries through much of the 19th  and 20th centuries. The industry and city grew together as firms slaughtered, processed and packaged livestock — particularly hogs and cattle — purchased from local farmers and distributed  products for regional, national and international markets. Because the work was hard, dangerous, cold and dirty, it provided an entry into the working class for Milwaukee’s newest residents — immigrants from Germany, southern and eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th Century, then from the Jim Crow South, Mexico and more recently even Myanmar and the Middle East

Some of Milwaukee’s most iconic names are associated with meatpacking. John Plankinton, for example, opened a butcher shop in 1844 on what is now West Wisconsin Avenue, and John and Frederick Layton opened Layton and Son a short time later on what is today North Water Street. In 1852 the Laytons partnered with another firm to establish a larger meatpacking operation in the Menomonee Valley. As the marsh was filled in and canal and rail networks developed, the valley’s large, flat areas emerged as an ideal location for the city’s fledgling meatpacking district that lasted until Cargill announced  it was closing its last remaining Milwaukee plant. 

The loss of the plant’s 221 jobs was not preordained or a consequence  of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Rather it was the direct result of anti-union corporate policies and the federal government’s failure to pursue existing anti-monopoly regulations that once protected regional meatpacking firms, their unionized employees and the ranchers and farmers who produced the cattle.

The fight against monopolies

The Sherman Antitrust Act, the nation’s first law to prohibit monopolistic business practices, was actually passed following a congressional investigation of price fixing in meatpacking. Five companies — Armour, Swift, Morris, Wilson and Cudahy, together known as the Beef Trust — controlled 55% of the market at the beginning of the 20th century. For decades, the federal government tried to break up the Beef Trust without success. But after an FTC inquiry concluded that these companies had conspired to raise prices and shared livestock information to lowball ranchers for their cattle, the Beef Trust members were forced to sign a consent decree in 1920.  

The agreement required them to sell off their stockyards, retail meat stores, railway interests and livestock journals. A year later Congress created the Packers and Stockyards Administration (PASA) to prevent price fixing and monopolistic behavior. These changes established federal oversight over the industry and helped reinvigorate packinghouse workers’ efforts to unionize, which culminated in the 1930 industrial union drives. In the decade after World War II, almost 90% of the industry was unionized. Pattern bargaining established master agreements that standardized wages, benefits and working conditions at the major packing companies. Smaller firms signed contracts that matched those at the larger firms. Packinghouse workers’ wages rose to 20% above average manufacturing wages.

For the next 50 years the large meatpackers competed with hundreds of small regional firms like those in Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley. As recently as 1970 the nation’s four largest  meatpackers slaughtered only 21% of the nation’s cattle. 

But beginning in the 1960s packinghouse workers and their unions came under attack when Iowa Beef Processors was organized as a nonunion operation in the countryside of Iowa and Nebraska, far from the unionized urban meatpacking centers.  Currier Holman, one of its founders, was blunt, declaring, “Business, as we pursue it here at IBP, is very much like waging war.” Iowa Beef used its cost advantage to undermine the unionized packing plants. “The price cut should be deep enough to force some of our competitors . . . out of business,” declared IBP vice president Perry Haines in the early 1970s, according to an internal memo disclosed years later in court records.   

And Iowa Beef was successful. Profits at the country’s largest meatpacking firms  soared as labor costs declined and labor productivity increased.  In the late 1970s and early  ‘80s, more than a thousand packing plants closed. Between 1963 and 1984, the number of packinghouse workers in urban areas fell by more than 50,000; workers in rural plants went  from 25% of the national workforce to 50%.  Packinghouse workers’ wages were decimated. By the 1990s, packinghouse workers’ wages were 20% less than the average manufacturing wage. Today, meatpacking workers are among the lowest paid and most exploited manufacturing workers. 

A union defeat sets the stage for monopoly

In 1975, Milwaukee was the scene of a heroic fight that packinghouse workers and their union waged against the draconian cuts in compensation and to protect their jobs.  It began with a contract proposal from the Milwaukee Independent Meatpackers Association, representing eight companies in the city, that slashed wages and benefits. Local 248 of the Meat and Allied Foodworkers Union went on strike. 

The day the strike began, the eight employers began hiring replacement workers, some recruited from as far away as Nebraska and Texas. It was the first attempt by Milwaukee employers to bust a union since World War II. The Menomonee Valley filled with angry picketers — Black, Latino and white, rallying together to protect their jobs. But after 15 months, the employers association had their victory and decertified the union, while hundreds of hard-working union men lost their jobs. Full-time permanent employees were replaced by low-wage workers, frequently hired through temp agencies. The strike legitimized replacement workers, setting off  waves of attacks on Milwaukee’s working class and their unions,  including at Patrick Cudahy 10 years later, and contributed to the economic collapse of Milwaukee’s Black community.   

As the strike dragged on, Bernie Peck, the owner of Peck Packing, the largest of the firms in the employers’ association, bought out smaller firms in the group. He eventually sold the company to Sara Lee Meat Group in 1985. Sara Lee Meat Group was sold to Emmpak, which was eventually sold to Cargill Inc. — today one of four meatpacking firms that control the U.S. market.  Cargill shuttered most of the Milwaukee operations in 2014, laying off over 600 workers, leaving only the ground beef plant that is now being eliminated, the last remnant of the historic Menomonee Valley meatpacking district. 

Today, Cargill, the largest privately held company in the United States, and the other three giants  — Tyson Foods, JBS USA  and National Beef — dominate more than 80% of the U.S. fed-cattle market. That gives them near-total control over cattle prices and the national beef supply chain, a power they have abused relentlessly against ranchers and consumers alike. The words of Upton Sinclair from “The Jungle” ring as true today as when he wrote them in 1906: “They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.”

In February 2025, JBS USA agreed to pay $83.5 million to settle a class-action antitrust suit alleging that the company, along with Tyson, Cargill and National Beef, colluded to suppress the prices paid to ranchers  and inflate downstream margins — one of several cases documenting the industry’s monopoly practices.  In October, Tyson and Cargill settled for a combined $87.5 million. These are not isolated incidents but part of a broader price-fixing economy, in which the meatpackers share market data, restrict capacity and move in lockstep to extract profit from both ranchers and consumers. The meatpackers also delay slaughter schedules to force ranchers into distressed sales and manipulate captive-supply contracts that lock independent producers into one-sided terms.

The repeal of Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL) has amplified meatpackers’ power. With labeling transparency gone, packers can legally import cheap beef from Mexico, Brazil, or Argentina, blend it with U.S. product, and sell it under a domestic label. Consumers pay premium prices believing they’re buying American, while ranchers receive depressed bids for cattle amid increasing import competition. COOL’s repeal effectively legalized country of origin misrepresentation, enabling packers to and reap near-monopoly profits from deception and price fixing. 

While ranchers lose leverage and see their herds shrink, and consumers pay more at the supermarket, the meatpackers’ margins have soared. USDA data show that the gap between what ranchers are paid for cattle and what consumers pay for beef has widened sharply in recent years — clear evidence that meatpackers are capturing an ever-larger share of the final beef dollar even as U.S. cattle inventories decline.

How monopoly power costs workers — and the community

The result is a market that looks competitive on paper but operates like a monopoly — where a handful of corporations control price setting, labeling, and distribution from feedlot to grocery shelf.

The number of workers in the industry has fallen precipitously, while output per worker has increased by 79%, according to the Department of Labor. In essence, fewer people are producing more and working harder. As the meatpackers increased chain speeds, the number of debilitating injuries to workers caused by the repetitive motions of their arms, wrists and hands began increasing. Labor Department figures show that from 1973 through 1986, the number of workdays lost each year to injury or illness at  meat plants rose from 136.6 per 100 workers to 238.3. By contrast, among manufacturers overall, lost workdays over the same years hovered between 70 and 90 per 100 workers and at several points dipped below 70.

The attacks on packinghouse workers’ unions and the increased economic concentration of meatpacking firms are bad for workers, ranchers and consumers. And it is not an anomaly. Most important sectors of the United States economy — industries as varied as airlines, cereal, soft drinks, fire trucks and even concert ticket sales — are dominated by a handful of firms. The result is monopoly profits for the companies while workers are exploited. Meanwhile the  consumers and the suppliers that survive are at the mercy of these ravenous companies. 

The lack of antitrust action has destroyed an iconic Wisconsin industry and the jobs of its packinghouse workers. The end of Cargill is a canary in the coal mine for the U.S. economy.

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WASHINGTON —  Kevin Warsh assumed his new role as chair of the Federal Reserve Friday after a swearing-in ceremony in the White House East Room, where U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the oath of office.

President Donald Trump said before a crowd of high-profile former and current lawmakers and officials that he wants Warsh, of Florida, to be “totally independent.”

“I want him to be independent and just do a great job. Don’t look at me, don’t look at anybody, just do your own thing and do a great job,” Trump said.

Warsh vowed to be a “reform-oriented” leader in brief remarks after he was sworn in as the 17th Fed chair by Thomas. Warsh’s wife, Jane Lauder, held a Bible for him.

“Our mandate at the Fed is to promote price stability and maximum employment. When we pursue those aims with wisdom and clarity, independence and resolve, inflation can be lower, growth stronger, real take-home pay higher, and America can be more prosperous, and no less important, America’s place in the world more secure,” said Warsh, who previously served as a Fed board governor during the 2008 global financial crisis.

Also at the ceremony was Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Warsh worked with at the White House during President George W. Bush’s administration. 

Trump attacks on Powell

Warsh’s swearing-in ceremony caps Trump’s long campaign of public attacks on former Fed Chair Jerome Powell, appointed by the president during his first term in 2018. 

Trump ramped up threats over the past year to fire and replace Powell if he did not lower interest rates.

With the November midterms less than six months away, Trump is increasingly facing economic headwinds as inflation hit its highest mark last month since 2023, and the president’s approval ratings on the cost of living continue to sag.

Trump’s feud with Powell reached a boiling point in January when the Department of Justice opened a criminal probe into Powell and the central bank over the multibillion-dollar cost to renovate the Fed’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. After being subpoenaed, Powell issued a rare public video statement dismissing the investigation as a maneuver to weaken the Fed’s independence.

Trump’s investigation into Powell marred his nomination of Warsh, even within his own party. The retiring U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., withheld his key committee vote to advance Warsh’s nomination to the Senate until the Department of Justice announced in late April it would drop the probe. 

Just over a month prior to the administration nixing the case, a federal judge had blocked the DOJ’s criminal subpoenas, citing “abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair.”

Trump is also tangled in litigation after attempting to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook. The Supreme Court is reviewing whether Trump overstepped his presidential authority when he fired her without cause.

‘Sock puppet’

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, issued a scathing statement Friday morning questioning Warsh’s transparency about his investments during the nomination process, and alleging he will not remain independent from the president.

“Kevin Warsh starts his tenure with his credibility in tatters. Having proven himself to be Donald Trump’s sock puppet, I worry Mr. Warsh will prioritize the President’s political interests over the economic well-being of American families,” said Warren, D-Mass.

Powell will stay on as a member of the Fed’s board of governors. 

Large, immigrant-rich cities saw population fall back between mid-2024 and mid-2025 after nation-leading increases the year before. 

Mid-sized cities led the pack in U.S. Census Bureau estimates to be released May 14. The largest numeric increases for the year were in Charlotte, North Carolina (up 20,731); Fort Worth, Texas (up 19,512); the Dallas suburb of Celina, Texas (up 12,710); and Seattle (up 11,572). 

Charlotte has been emphasizing affordable housing in recent years, including a city-sponsored 72-unit building on the site of a former mall, opening in late 2024. It was designed for older adults, people with incomes from 30% to 80% of the area’s median income, about $82,000 at the time. 

Morgan Dunn, 26, moved to Charlotte in 2024 for a banking job after growing up in California and living in Georgia and Utah. He and his wife are expecting their first child in September, and he said he likes having an affordable house with a half-acre lot where his four dogs can run.

“It’s a great city for the younger generations for the sake of job opportunities combined with the cost of living,” Dunn said in a message to Stateline.

New York City, which led the nation in growth between mid-2023 and mid-2024 with 162,991 more people, fell to dead last in population change — a decrease of 12,196 last year.  

Also near the bottom were Memphis, Tennessee (losing 4,575 people); Los Angeles, down 3,621; St. Louis, down 2,301, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, down 2,290. Like New York City, Los Angeles ranked high the year before with an increase of 24,421, seventh-highest in the nation before falling to third-to-last.

Part of the reason for New York City’s fast-changing population shifts is that population growth was revised up for 2022-2024 to reflect more immigration, especially from asylum seekers, some of whom were bused from Texas. Parts of Queens had some of the largest influxes in the nation from asylum seekers, especially from Ecuador, according to a Stateline analysis. 

But immigration fell off in late 2024 and early 2025 as both the Biden and Trump administrations sought to put a lid on asylum seekers. Between 2024 and 2024 immigration “retreated from recent historical highs to more typical levels experienced before the pandemic,” according to a March report by New York City. Of the city’s five boroughs, only the Bronx and Staten Island gained population. 

“Big-city growth slowed significantly between 2024 and 2025, with some major hubs even seeing small declines,” Matt Erickson, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division, said in a statement. “In contrast, midsized cities found a ‘Goldilocks zone’ where domestic and international migration, paired with new housing, helped prevent the sluggish growth seen in small towns and larger metropolitan centers.”

In some states smaller cities had the big increases, such as the contrast between New York City’s decline and an increase of 2,933 in suburban Kiryas Joel village, a Hasidic Jewish enclave in Orange County, or New Mexico, where Albuquerque lost population but its suburb Rio Rancho gained 1,972. 

Louisiana’s Baton Rouge gained while New Orleans lost, as did Everett, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb that grew as the city lost population.

Some urban areas did well anyway: Atlanta had the biggest increase in Georgia, as did Chicago in Illinois, Detroit in Michigan, Kansas City in Missouri, and Newark in New Jersey. 

Other milestones: Austin, Texas, became the 12th city with more than a million residents, and Raleigh, North Carolina, became the 39th city of more than 500,000. The South had 11 of the top 12 numeric gains. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The fiscal leaders of several states are demanding transparency and consumer fairness as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to refund billions in international tariffs following a recent Supreme Court loss. 

In a February decision, the high court dealt a blow to the president’s trade agenda, ruling by a 6-3 margin that the tariffs he issued under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act were illegal.

Last month, U.S. Customs and Border Protection began accepting applications from importers and brokers who are owed an estimated $166 billion in import tax refunds. While companies are receiving those refunds, it appears that many don’t intend to share those funds with consumers, who paid for much of the tariffs through higher prices. 

“We’re the ones who paid it. We’re the ones that need to get it back, and so any system that doesn’t get it to the little guy doesn’t get it to the right place,” Minnesota State Auditor Julie Blaha said on a press call Wednesday.

She was among eight Democratic state fiscal leaders who urged the White House to publicly disclose which firms are receiving tariff refunds and to ensure consumers are not left out.

Blaha said government agencies are well equipped for that task, noting the public websites set up during the coronavirus pandemic that disclosed which companies received pandemic grants and loans. There is currently no public database of tariff refund requests or agency determinations.  

“We’re not asking the federal government to do anything they don’t ask of states and local entities or nonprofits to do when they are using some of their funds,” she said. “We know how to do this kind of oversight.”

Blaha said transparency is particularly important since the White House is opposed to repaying the tariffs in the first place. The president has said his administration would “fight” the refund effort, though reports indicate more than $35 billion has already been sent to companies. 

Illinois State Treasurer Mike Frerichs said American consumers are suffering from high prices as the president and his inner circle enrich themselves. 

“No one trusts the federal government anymore,” he said. “They feel like the deck is stacked against them, and this example just adds further proof to their beliefs.”

State leaders estimated the tariffs cost Illinois consumers nearly $9 billion. But the current process does not ensure that those funds will be returned to consumers. 

“Trump’s system is opaque by design, with no guarantee of the $9 billion owed to Illinois families and businesses returning home,” Frerichs said Wednesday. “…Millions of Americans and businesses deserve every penny back.”

The president blasted conservative Supreme Court justices who nixed his tariffs, saying their decision earlier this year was a “disgrace to our nation” as well as “unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution.”

He has remained committed to tariffs on foreign imports, believing that they will incentivize manufacturers to build products in the United States rather than overseas. 

After the Supreme Court loss, Trump ordered a 10% global tariff, which has also been challenged in court. Last week, the U.S. Court of International Trade granted a permanent injunction to a Florida-based toy manufacturer and a New York-based spice importer that sued the Trump administration over those tariffs. 

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org. 

When Katy Dicks’ two children were both in childcare programs, she and her partner would dread sitting down each month to have the hard conversations about which bills would go on their multiple credit cards, the highest with a 20% interest rate, and which they could pay outright. “It’s a constant budgeting game,” Dicks said, although she and her family watch every penny and keep their finances as tight as possible. 

According to Act For Early Years, the global childcare campaign, the major expense that weighed on Katy and her partner each month is what also plagues 70% of American parents: the high cost of childcare. According to Care.com, Katy, 45, and her domestic partner, who live in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, are like parents across the nation for whom care has become an “all-consuming strain.” The same source found that mothers report “significantly higher levels of overwhelm, guilt, and identity loss” than fathers, pressuring many to leave the workforce. In fact, of the 455,000 women who left the workforce in 2025, roughly 42% pointed to caregiving costs as the No. 1 reason. In the past 40 years, cost has been the primary reason for the steepest decline in mothers of young children participating in the workforce. 

Katy, whose children are now ages 7 and 11, works primarily as a Pharmacy Project Coordinator, but she is also a realtor, and a co-owner of a logistics business with her partner. Katy considers herself “blessed” because she found wonderful, regulated childcare nearby for both of her children, and she “felt good with the care my children received.” However, between the full-time home-based care and the preschool for both children, it cost her and her partner between $20,000-$30,000 per year over six years for a total of $167,000. Average annual costs for childcare in Wisconsin range between $13,000 and $18,000. Even working her three jobs, she and her partner still owe $45,000 in credit card debt because of their childcare costs. According to a new study, a two-child family would need to earn $400,000 to make childcare affordable, defined as 7% of income by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, an unreachable sum for most families including Katy and her partner.

The reason for the high cost of childcare in the U.S. is primarily due to the fact that early childhood education is not considered a public good. Therefore, with little to no public investment in childcare for everyone, early educators are often entirely reliant upon parents’ private tuition payments to operate their programs. Despite high tuition rates, Wisconsin providers earn, on average, $13.55 per hour, compared to the average hourly wage of $28.44 for Wisconsin workers, with family childcare providers earning $7.46 per hour. 

This changed during the COVID-19 pandemic when the federal government recognized childcare as essential and distributed funds to states to stabilize the childcare workforce. In Wisconsin, $20 million per month was distributed to approximately 5,000 licensed providers, assisting in the retention of 72,000 professionals, and supporting care for over 417,000 children throughout the state through a program called Child Care Counts. While recent research shows that this program was highly effective, the majority of Republican legislators rejected continued funding for the program. Additionally, even though the 2025-2027 budget for the first time included state funds for childcare, that funding ends in June 2026, leaving providers once again on their own to figure out how to continue, or in many cases simply to close their programs. 

Katy also experienced complications during pregnancy and her maternity leave. During her first pregnancy she developed pre-eclampsia and had to be hospitalized and induced. After just three months of maternity leave at partial pay, she said, “It was the hardest day of my life to go back to work. What I needed was 12 months to heal and bond with my baby.” Nonetheless, she felt fortunate that she had childcare in place, had kept her job, and therefore had health insurance to pay all of her medical bills. 

When Katy returned to work, she went to her infant’s child care program every day to breastfeed her baby on her lunch break, to bond with her baby and also because she wasn’t able to pump enough milk to last through the day. When she tried pumping at work, she felt like her male supervisor was always “breathing down my neck,” and pumping twice a day felt like she was “pushing it.” Not long after, her supervisor gave her a performance improvement plan (PIP) for taking time out to pump breast milk.

With her second child, in a new position, Katy developed pre-eclampsia again, and had to be induced, but at this employer, she felt the pressure to quit working more intensely. After she repeatedly brought up the topic of maternity leave with her male supervisor, the company finally agreed to give her three months of unpaid leave. She made a plea for partial pay during her leave, only to be informed by her supervisor that the company would indeed adopt a partially paid maternity leave, but not until after her maternity leave was over. He also told her that she was the first employee he had who was pregnant and required maternity leave. 

The U.S. is the only wealthy nation on Earth that lacks federally mandated, paid maternity leave, even though about three-quarters of mothers are employed. As of January 2026, only 14 states and the District of Columbia had a mandated, paid maternity leave of eight to 12 weeks. Wisconsin does not have mandated, paid maternity leave. 

Katy’s  experiences ultimately drove her to take a leadership position in the Mother Forward chapter in Wisconsin to push for better policies so that mothers are set up for success.

It’s different in Denmark

When Manal Stulgaitis, an American, moved to Denmark to work for the United Nations, she had no idea how the early childhood education system worked. She visited the country  ahead of her family before the move to check out childcare programs. One morning, when she was out for a jog, she stumbled across an enchanting scene. Peering through a tall fence surrounding a huge residential house, she saw children in snowsuits playing on climbing equipment built into the trees and sitting under a structure whittling sticks around a fire. Teachers stood nearby, observing and supporting the children in their explorations. Manal decided to visit the place right away. She found the administrator and teachers welcoming and they quickly determined that they had space, so she was able to enroll her 3-year-old without delay. The center was part of the public early childhood education system, and she remembers it cost approximately $400 per month, and “was absolutely zero stress.” Meanwhile, her 6-year-old attended public school. 

Manal, 51, whose children are now 10 and 13 years old, like all parents in Denmark, was  entitled to a guaranteed childcare slot regardless of income or geographic location. Indeed, Danish law mandates this and ensures that parents pay no more than 25% of the cost of childcare, unless a family’s income is below a certain threshold, in which case it is free. 

As for maternity leave, although it did not apply to Manal since her children were older, the standard in Denmark is a paid shared parental leave that begins four weeks before a mother gives birth and continues for 24 weeks post birth. Another parent can share up to 10 weeks of the leave, and there is additional flexibility depending on the circumstances for a total of 52 weeks. Recent research shows that Denmark’s childcare and paid parental leave policies combined erase 80% of what’s called “the motherhood penalty” for working mothers, allowing them to pursue their careers and passions. This is certainly the case for Manal, who said, “I don’t think there are words to describe how it impacts you individually or how it impacts our family. To have the essentials like healthcare and childcare and education taken care of by the state – both financially and in terms of the regulatory aspects — gives every single Danish person a huge measure of confidence. We were so lucky to experience that system, which serves children and their parents so well.” 

Policymakers in the U.S. have chosen a hands-off approach to childcare and maternity leave. This has had the effect of normalizing the suffering new mothers and parents experience, pressures mothers to leave the workforce, stalls their careers, and loads parents with debt. Denmark, on the other hand, has chosen to promote equality for mothers by mandating and investing in both paid parental leave and childcare. For Manal, the impact of having her daughter welcomed and supported in a high-quality early childhood education system was “a lifesaver.” She could be a  mother and have a high-powered career that demanded long days and frequent travel. Total confidence in her child’s program meant that she or her husband could “drop the kids off in the morning and not have a second thought about their safety or their wellbeing.” Having a high-quality system freed both her and her husband to focus fully on their work, without all the stress parents in the U.S. feel over their children’s well-being and the toll having a baby takes on their household  finances. Childcare advocates in the U.S. say policymakers here could choose policies that set mothers up for success, rather than test their grit, tolerance for debt, and willingness to endure the pain of worrying whether their children are getting good care. 

Across the country, citizens demanding universal child care in their own  communities are joining the thousands of mothers, child care providers, and advocates gathering on Monday, May 11, 2026 for the 5th annual Day Without Child Care.

Support for this reporting came from the Better Life Lab at New America.

The publisher of the Cap Times said Thursday that the news organization’s management will voluntarily recognize the eight-member newsroom staff’s union. 

The employees formally announced their union campaign in a meeting with Publisher Paul Fanlund and other Cap Times managers a week ago. They have affiliated with the NewsGuild-CWA, which also represents employees at Wisconsin Watch and at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. 

“The Capital Times Co. has decided to voluntarily recognize the labor union being formed by Capital Times reporters and we hope to work towards an amicable outcome,” Fanlund said in a statement Thursday. “In the meantime, we will continue the excellent reporting and opinion journalism that the community has come to depend upon.”

The Capital Times newspaper was founded in 1917 by William T. Evjue and throughout its history has been known in Madison as a staunch voice for liberal and progressive values, including its support for labor unions.

Since 2008, what was once a daily evening newspaper has published online with a weekly print tabloid edition. While retaining its original name as a business entity, the newspaper adopted its longstanding nickname among readers as its moniker.

In making their case for a union, the employees primarily focused on the paper’s progressive heritage as well as their interest in greater involvement in its operation.

“I’m proud of all the work we put into forming a union,” said Erin Gretzinger, the K-12 reporter at the Cap Times. “Management’s decision to voluntarily recognize us aligns with the Cap Times’ longstanding values, and it is reflective of our value to the newsroom and the broader Madison community. I look forward to the next steps in this process and working collaboratively to ensure a strong future for our newsroom.”

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Nearly 50 years after a strike that ended union representation at the Madison Capital Times, the newspaper’s eight newsroom employees announced last week they have joined a  union and are seeking a contract.

Ashley Rodriguez, a features writer and spokesperson for the union drive, said in an interview that the staffers have asked Publisher and President Paul Fanlund, Editor Mark Treinen and other newsroom managers to voluntarily recognize The NewsGuild-CWA as their union.

“We were received very professionally and cordially,” Rodriguez said.

Asked Tuesday about his response to the union petition, Fanlund said in an email message, “No comment at this time. Will let you know when we have something to say.”

Rodriguez said the union organizing campaign wasn’t in reaction to any particular developments at the newspaper.

“This isn’t about one thing, this isn’t about one person. This is about exercising our rights and knowing that we’re stronger together,” she said.

Since its conversion in 2008 from a daily evening paper to a digital outlet with a weekly free tabloid edition, the Capital Times now has formally adopted its longstanding nickname, the Cap Times.

Rodriguez said the union effort was in keeping with the news organization’s heritage as a champion of progressive values in Madison since the Capital Times was founded in 1917 by William T. Evjue, a former managing editor and business manager for the Wisconsin State Journal.

“He was angered by the State Journal’s editorials attacking Robert M. ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette, who he considered a hero,” states a history the Capital Times posted that was archived in 2007.

“The history of the Cap Times is to be a progressive voice — the voice of Madison, representing the voices of people who aren’t heard,” said Rodriguez. On its editorial pages, the paper has been a strong supporter of labor unions.

“I think this has been like a desire to embody how we see our role as reporters within our own system,” she said. “If we’re going to embody the mission of William Evjue, championing people’s rights and being the voice of the community, that has to exist internally as well.”

Rodriguez joined the staff in January 2025, but she said reporters had been interested in joining a union for years before she arrived, and helped produce the energy that led her and her colleagues to formally organize in the last year. Staff support for the union has been unanimous, she said.

“For us just the biggest thing is that local journalism is so vital to a healthy democracy and strong communities and the reporters that deliver that news just want to live in their communities and feel like their work is being valued as well,” Rodriguez said.

Since the 1940s, the Capital Times and the Wisconsin State Journal have shared business operations, forming a partnership, Madison Newspapers Inc., which owned the presses and conducted other business operations for both papers.

In 1977, MNI installed new printing technology, laying off typesetting employees and cutting wages of the remaining printing staff. The printing unions struck, joined by the newsroom unions of both newspapers.

The striking employees put out an independent paper, first weekly and later daily, the Madison Press Connection, which lasted until 1980, and the strike was settled in 1982 with a $1.5 million payment to the strikers. The unions were all decertified.

Editorially, the Capital Times “had always supported the labor movement,” said Phil Haslanger, one of the reporters who joined the strike. Up to that point, when the Newspaper Guild represented newsroom employees, “there had always been spirited negotiations between the Guild and, at that time, William Evjue, but they found a way to make it work.”

That made the dispute especially controversial. “Here you had a paper that was progressive, liberal, involved in this very complicated labor situation,” Haslanger said.

Haslanger was one of five employees who went back to the paper as part of the settlement agreement. Under the editor, Elliott Maraniss, “There was a real effort on the part of the Cap Times at the end of the strike to gracefully reintegrate those of us who had been in the strike,” he said.

In 2008, the Capital Times went from being a daily evening paper to a primarily online outlet, first with two free weekly tabloid editions, later reduced to one.

The union campaign also echoes the success of campaigns that have led to unions at several digital news organizations, including Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica. 

Both the Cap Times and the State Journal work out of the same building on Madison’s Southwest Side. Rodriguez said the unionizing effort involves only the staff of the Cap Times, owned by the Evjue Foundation, and not the employees of the State Journal, which is part of Lee Enterprises.

“We hope that management voluntarily recognizes us,” she said. “We think that recognizing the union would be in line with carrying out the values of the Cap Times.”

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Hundreds of people marched in Milwaukee’s annual May Day protest on a chilly, cloudy Friday, joining thousands of other protests, walk-outs, and economic black-outs taking place nationwide. After first gathering outside of the offices of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera on Mitchell Street, a crowd spanning multiple city blocks marched north towards the downtown Federal Building. 

The action aimed to draw attention to the contributions of working class people, including immigrants,  while condemning the policies of the Trump administration, and calling for the release of Wisconsinites who’ve been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 

“No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” the protesters chanted, marching down the roadway with traffic assistance from both their own volunteers and Milwaukee police officers. 

Marchers were greeted with a performance by a mariachi band playing  music as people cheered and danced. Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, said that those at the protest were joining “over 3,000 actions across the country, and tens of thousands of people in more than 30 cities that are part of a national immigrant-rights network.” 

Backed by the occasional rhythms of parade drums and cheers Neumann-Ortiz declared, “We are May Day strong!” She said that those participating in May Day protests are “leading the way in the movement against authoritarianism, against white nationalism, against ICE gestapo terror.” She praised the immigrant workers who couldn’t be there, as well as the students who participated in the May Day protest. Neumann-Ortiz said that President Donald Trump and his allies “want us to believe that we are powerless, and we know that is a lie.”

People of all ages and ethnic backgrounds came from as far away as Racine and Green Bay to attend the Milwaukee protest. They carried signs calling for the abolition of ICE, an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and occupation of Palestinian people, rolling back U.S. militarism, taxing billionaires, an end to local police cooperation with ICE, and generally denouncing Trump’s policies and character.

From the stage, speakers also demanded the reunification of immigrant families separated by ICE, investment in human needs, and the establishment of what Neumann-Ortiz called “a dignified immigration system with a path to citizenship for the undocumented,” as well as for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and people  fleeing danger in their home countries. 

She also called for lawmakers to support granting state driver’s licenses for immigrants and praised members of Congress who withheld funding from  the Department of Homeland Security as they sought accountability and standards for ICE officers. 

 

 

Speakers’ remarks in English were  translated to Spanish for the crowd. 

José Ramirez, president of the Milwaukee Chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement, said he is both the  son of immigrants and an immigrant himself. Ramirez and his sister were born in Mexico and came to the U.S. in the early 2000s. Both of his parents worked in the meat packing industry. When he grew older, Ramirez became a first-generation union member, and worked jobs in concrete and demolition. 

Ramirez asked the crowd to look around at the different colors, flags, signs, and people. “I like to believe that everybody here truly believes in the same thing,” despite their differences, Ramirez said. “That women’s rights are human rights. That gay rights are human rights. That workers’ rights and immigrant rights are human rights.” 

Ramirez stressed that the victories working-class people have achieved have not come because of the sympathy of career politicians, whether Democrat or Republican, but from the sacrifice of working-class people.

Kareem Sarsour, the son of Salah Sarsour —  the president of the Milwaukee Islamic Society who was arrested by ICE in late March — also addressed the crowd. While he was born and raised in Milwaukee, Kareem said that his father was an immigrant who’d grown up as a Palestinian boy in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Sarsour was a legal permanent resident for over 30 years when ICE officers ambushed him at a property he owned. Sarsour’s family and supporters believe that he was targeted because of his longtime advocacy for Palestinian liberation, and for sharing his experiences while in Israeli custody. Sarsour is being held in an immigration detention facility in Indiana.

Kareem recalled that on March 30, his wife called him at work and told him  that his father “was abducted and nowhere to be found.” Kareem Sarsour said that “no family should get that call.” He said of Salah Sarsour and other people he called “heroes”  “we believe God is with them, and with our unity we’re able to take a stand and say enough is enough! In sha’ Allah — God willing — justice will prevail, our heroes will come back home, Palestine will be free, and our families will be reunited.”

Ingrid Walker Henry, President of the Milwaukee Teacher Education Association (MTEA), said, “ Everywhere we turn, our rights are under attack. Our neighbors are being terrorized by a hostile administration, they are using every trick in the fascist playbook.” Walker Henry called Sarsour a “pillar of our community,” and denounced his detention. “I have three words — and I’m going to want you to repeat them — free Salah now!” 

Walker Henry said that her union members are getting organized “because we know that no one is coming to save us, except us.” MTEA members established school defense teams to protect schools and families this school year, “because no family should have to choose between taking their children to school and risking their family’s safety,” she said. “Across this city, MTEA members are stepping up to protect our children from this administration.” 

Walker Henry said  actions like May Day teach the next generation how to fight back against oppression. “MTEA members will not rest until every student, every public school, and every family has what they need to thrive.”

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Wisconsin’s economic growth is continuing to slow down, with job numbers down from a year ago and unemployment up slightly, the state labor department reported Thursday.

“The Wisconsin labor market has cooled a bit along with the national economy,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the office of economic advisors at the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. “But unemployment remains historically low.”

Jobs and employment data are collected through two separate surveys conducted by the federal government.

The number of jobs reported each month is projected based on a federal survey of employers’ payrolls. The number of people listed as employed or unemployed is projected based on a survey of U.S. households each month.

With the release of data for March on Thursday, Wisconsin now has the jobs and employment picture for the full first quarter of 2026. The release of January and February data was delayed until earlier in April while DWD adjusted its data calculations in comparison with unemployment insurance tax collections. That annual benchmarking process was delayed further due to the October 2025 federal government shutdown.

“Through 2025 and now into ‘26, we are seeing continued growth still, but it does seem to be decelerating some,” Hodek said.

The number of jobs reported each month is projected based on a federal survey of employers’ payrolls. The number of people listed as employed or unemployed is projected based on a survey of U.S. households each month.

The household survey results projected 109,500 people were unemployed in March, an increase of 2,200 from February  and an increase of 8,400 from March 2025. The unemployment rate — the percentage of people who report they are actively seeking work — went up to 3.5% in March. It has increased by a tenth of a percentage point each month for the last three months.

Wisconsin had a projected 3,021,600 jobs in March, about 1,200 more than February of this year but  a loss of more than 17,000 since March 2025. Hodek said that echoed an increase in the number of jobs nationally from February to March.

The construction industry, which has been doing well in Wisconsin, showed a projected 151,800 jobs in March, 1,800 fewer than in February, but a gain of 6,600 jobs from March 2025.

“There are a lot of jobs there still, and if anything, the employment trend over the last year has likely accelerated,” Hodek said.

A challenge has been a continued shortage of workers. “What we’re seeing is demand still outstripping supply,” Hodek said. “There’s not enough crews to go around.”

The number of jobs in manufacturing was projected at 453,600 in March, 1,800 more than in February but a loss of 5,200 jobs from March 2025.

There were a projected 437,500 jobs in healthcare and social assistance in March, a gain of 300 from February and a gain of 4,900 from March 2025.

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Economic growth is slowing down nationally and in Wisconsin this year, on top of a year of underperformance in 2025, a national economist for the homebuilding industry said Wednesday.

At a presentation in Madison to the Wisconsin Bankers Association, Robert Dietz said the risk for a recession has risen in 2026, driven in large part by the Iran war and its effect on the price of oil.

Dietz is the chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, which at the start of 2026 gauged a 30% chance for a recession this year — already a little higher than the average annual risk of 15-20%.

The 2026 Wisconsin Economic Forecast, an annual program, was put on by WisPolitics + State Affairs and  WisBusiness along with the bankers group.

For this year, “we have now raised that to 40% , and you can find plenty of economists that think that recession risk is about 50% or higher,” Dietz said.

Up to now, the economy has been “good, not great,” Dietz said, with annual growth of 2.1% in 2025.

“We expect the economy this year to grow at only a 1.9% growth rate,” he added. “It’s getting awfully close to what we call stall speed at that level, and obviously the run up in oil prices is the big dragging factor that is hurting.”

The national unemployment rate is 4.3% — a point higher than Wisconsin’s rate of 3.3%. With slower economic growth in the picture, his team is forecasting the unemployment rate to rise up to 5% — “not bad, but it is deteriorating,” Dietz said.

Tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump are also impinging on the economy, Dietz added.

“Tariffs change the cost of inputs,” Dietz said, affecting economic sectors ranging from soybeans to manufacturing. “The cost of aluminum in the United States right now is 40% higher than it is in the global marketplace. That is due to tariffs. And I’m a supply-side free market economist — I’m not a big fan of taxes, I’m not a big fan of tariffs. I just don’t think they’re a particularly good way to raise revenue.”

In 2025, U.S. manufacturing lost about 100,000 jobs, “and that was directly attributable to tariffs.”

With the war in Iran and a corresponding spike in the price of oil, inflation has jumped back over 3%, Dietz said.

But for the last three years, more than half of the increase in the consumer price index has been in the cost of housing, including rent and other homeownership costs. Dietz said the homebuilding industry wants to see policies that reduce the cost of construction and increase housing inventory.

Another “caution flag” on the horizon is consumer debt, he said. Mortgage delinquency rates have risen slightly but remain low. Other debt indicators have prompted concern, however.

Delinquency rates are rising on shorter-term loans for seven to nine years. Credit card delinquency rates have gone up, and the average credit card interest rate, 20-25%, is “kind of a yellow caution flag.”

About one in three car owners with unpaid loans has a balance that is more than the car’s market value, Dietz said — echoing the subprime housing loan crisis that helped trigger the Great Recession in 2008.

Student loan delinquencies, however, have gone up to more than 16% — one-and-a-half times their peak in 2013.

“That’s going to have an impact on rental demand” in the housing market, Dietz said. For the borrowers who fall behind, it could endanger their future credit and crowd them out of the home-buying market.

Economic uncertainty persists, and “the cost of that uncertainty” has been declining international investment in 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds, Dietz said. In response to that drop-off, the interest rate paid to investors on those bonds has risen to 4.4% after starting the year at 4%.

“That’s going to have follow-up effects on mortgage rates, real estate development and apartment construction,” Dietz said.

In a follow-up discussion, economist Scott Hodek of the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and Tim Schneider, president and CEO of Bank Five Nine in Oconomowoc, echoed much of Dietz’s assessment, while observing that Wisconsin overall has been in better shape so far.

Even with some decline in overall jobs and in the labor force over the last year in Wisconsin, “we’ve seen growth in some industries,” Hodek said — notably construction and healthcare. While manufacturing employment has fallen, Hodek said manufacturers still report having jobs to fill, but difficulty filling them.

Wisconsin residents of working age who are younger than 65 and who don’t have jobs are most often people with responsibilities for caring for their children or for the elderly, Hodek said. That means addressing the demand for care as well as other factors that might get in the way of people wanting to join the labor force, he said, because when there’s a mismatch between workers and the jobs available, “you’re going to have folks sitting on the sidelines.”

Schneider said that from his vantage point, Wisconsin’s economy is “in pretty good condition.” Tariff expenses, fuel surcharges as the price of gas goes up and continued concerns about finding workers complicate that picture, he added.

Immigrant workers remain important in industries ranging from dairy farming to construction, he said.

“I think we need to figure that out at the federal level,” Schneider said. “And I’ve talked to our congressional folks and Senate folks about this — both sides just can’t seem to figure it out. I think both want the same thing, but just can’t get it done.”

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve was one step closer to the job Wednesday after North Carolina Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis cast the deciding vote to advance Kevin Warsh’s nomination to the full Senate.

Lawmakers on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs voted 13-11 along party lines to move Warsh to the next step.

The potential turnover at the top of the Fed, which sets monetary policy, comes as Americans see higher costs hit their pocketbooks, particularly soaring prices at the gas pump, as the U.S.-Iran conflict disrupts worldwide energy supplies.

Tillis had withheld his support until the Trump administration announced Friday it would drop what the senator described as a “bogus” investigation of current Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

“It’s no secret that the reason that Mr. Warsh’s nomination could have been held up is because of my concern with the investigation. I want to thank the Department of Justice for the assurances that they gave me,” Tillis, R-N.C., said following the panel’s brief morning session that lasted just under 15 minutes.

“The fact of the matter is, this was based on two minutes of testimony. It was not criminal,” Tillis said of the DOJ’s probe into Powell’s June 2025 testimony to Congress on a major $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

The committee vote comes after Trump’s sustained verbal attacks on Powell over several months, including numerous public threats to fire the Fed leader if he did not agree to lower interest rates. `

A federal judge last month blocked the administration’s subpoenas to probe the Fed and Powell, citing “a mountain of evidence” that Trump was using the investigation to force Powell’s hand.

The Fed was scheduled to meet Wednesday afternoon to deliver its latest decision on interest rates, possibly the last under Powell, whose term expires May 15.

Inflation, affordability

The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, said the vote brings Trump “one step closer to completing his illegal attempt to seize control of the Fed and to artificially juice the economy.” 

Inflation and affordability are emerging as major issues ahead of the 2026 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. 

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said his constituents in Georgia and beyond “deserve to know that the Fed is on their side, maximizing their chances to keep a good paying job and keeping their lives affordable, not on the side of the president’s poll numbers or his political concerns as we approach the midterm.”

“Fed independence is not theoretical. It matters to the everyday lives of working families,” Warnock said.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll taken between April 24-27, 61% of Americans think the U.S. economy is on the wrong track. 

When asked about the costs and benefits of the war in Iran, only a quarter of respondents said they agreed the U.S. military operation was worth it, according to the Ipsos poll.

Americans have watched fuel prices climb in March and April after Iran retaliated against the U.S.-Israeli attacks by choking off the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow maritime passageway where, prior to the war, one-fifth of the world’s petroleum passed.

Gas prices climb

The average price across the U.S. for a gallon of regular gas reached $4.23 Wednesday, not only the highest price point since the U.S. launched operations in Iran on Feb. 28, but also the highest since July 2022, according to GasBuddy.  

Prior to the war, a gallon of regular hadn’t topped $3 all year.

A return to normal, free flow in the strait — which was about 140 vessels per day pre-war — appears out of reach at the moment, as Trump announced last weekend his negotiators pulled back again on attending talks in Islamabad.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sidestepped a question Wednesday regarding how much longer the war might last, asked by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., before the House Armed Services Committee.

During the same hearing however, the Pentagon’s Jules Hurst III, acting undersecretary of war who oversees finances, did reveal the war had so far cost the U.S. $25 billion.

While the Fed’s inflation target is 2%, data released at the beginning of April showed prices for all items rose 3.3% over a year ago. The jump was largely driven by a 21% spike in fuel prices from February to March.

The Fed’s so-called “dual mandate” is to maximize employment and stabilize prices. The Fed primarily loosens or tightens the economy by adjusting interest rates — lowering them if the economy lags and inflation is too low, and raising them when inflation becomes too high.

Lisa Cook firing

Warren and Warnock also noted Trump’s ousting in August of Fed Governor Lisa Cook, appointed to the board by former President Joe Biden. The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing whether Trump exceeded his authority in firing Cook.

Warnock said he was dissatisfied with Warsh’s written responses to additional questions sent after his April 21 nomination hearing before the committee.

“I asked, quote: ‘If President Trump, or any future president, attempts to unlawfully fire you without cause, would you leave the Federal Reserve?’ His response, quote: ‘I will not answer hypothetical questions of this nature,’” Warnock recounted.

“Well, this isn’t a hypothetical question. In fact, the president attempted to fire Governor Cook this in the past year, and the president has repeatedly mused about firing Chair Powell because he won’t bend to his interest rate demands — doing so as recently as two weeks ago,” Warnock said, referring to Trump’s comments during an April 15 Fox Business interview. 

Asked Wednesday afternoon if he thinks Warsh will persuade the Fed’s board of governors to lower interest rates, Trump told reporters, “They should because it’s a good time to lower them. We’re the most prime country anywhere in the world.”

Powell also faced questions Wednesday afternoon.

When asked whether he expects Warsh will remain independent of Trump, Powell said, “He testified very strongly to that effect in his hearing, and I’ll take him at his word.”

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.

This report was updated at 1:35 p.m. 4/23/2026.

Employees of two Wisconsin clinics operated by Rogers Behavioral Health voted by large majorities in favor of union representation Wednesday after more than two months in which the mental health nonprofit had campaigned heavily against the union.

In West Allis, employees voted 53-4 in favor of joining the National Union of Healthcare Workers. In Madison, the vote to join the union was 26-4. The votes were supervised by National Labor Relations Board officials at both clinics.

Employees at the two clinics “are ready to negotiate contracts that would provide better pay, protections to ensure safe staffing levels and more time to care for individual patients, as Rogers workers secured in California after joining NUHW,” the union stated in a press release Thursday.

The union represents Rogers employees at three facilities in California, where contracts have been negotiated, and one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where contract negotiations are underway. “While contract negotiations are still ongoing in Philadelphia, the contracts Rogers agreed to for workers based in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and San Diego are among the best in the industry,”  the union statement said. “They include strong raises, limits on caseloads, and guarantees that no jobs will be lost to new technologies, including artificial intelligence.”

Rogers, based in Oconomowoc, said in a statement released Thursday, “We acknowledge the union election outcomes in Madison and West Allis Lincoln Center. We are evaluating our next steps in support of our system of care. We are committed to our patients, our people, and the integrated care that has made Rogers a trusted provider across Wisconsin since 1907.”

The union said in its press release that during the West Allis election Wednesday, Rogers management “prohibited NUHW’s representative from entering the facility and then suspended a worker who had agreed to serve as the union’s observer.”

Federal labor law procedures call for representatives from management as well as the union to observe the vote count. The absence of a union observer “could have resulted in the ballots being impounded and not immediately counted,” the union press release stated.

A second Rogers employee volunteered to serve as the union observer for the count “over the objections of Rogers’ representatives,” the NUHW stated, adding that Rogers did not attempt to stop ballots from being counted at the Madison clinic.

The workers involved were among three employees fired shortly after workers announced their petition for a union. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges over the terminations, claiming that the three were fired in retaliation for their support for unionization, which is illegal under federal law.

Rogers has declined to explain the firings, citing employment confidentiality, but said that it has not violated any laws.

Rogers Behavioral Health issued a follow-up statement Thursday about the voting conflict in West Allis. According to the statement, “individuals who are no longer employeed by Rogers had illegally entered the facility,” and Rogers contacted local police.

The next step will be for the National Labor Relations Board to certify the results. But a federal lawsuit challenging the agency is still pending. In addition, Rogers said in public statements as well as in communications to the workers before the vote that the company would not begin bargaining with the union until all its appeals have been exhausted. 

The nonprofit campaigned actively against unionization, telling employees that a union would not have been in the interests of the staff, the patients or the organization. In a final letter distributed on Monday, Rogers urged employees to vote no and made statements that the organization had made mistakes and wanted to be given another chance to improve relationships with the staff without a union.

Union supporters welcomed the outcome of Wednesday’s votes.

“We are thrilled with the overwhelming victory,” said Stephani Lohman, a nurse practitioner who was among those active in the union organizing campaign and was one of the three fired employees. “Over the last few weeks Rogers has shown us exactly why we need a union by running an aggressive anti-worker campaign, trying everything in their toolbox to intimidate and demoralize us, but it failed spectacularly because it was so cruel and wicked that it drove everyone to support the union.”

According to union supporters, the union campaign began late last year after changes at Rogers that included clinicians being reclassified from salaried to hourly, which resulted in schedule changes that increased patient volumes for staff members and reduced individual patient care. The organization increased caseload caps, “forcing caregivers to be responsible for far more patients than previously,” the NUHW said in its statement.

This report has been updated with additional information and comments Thursday from both the National Union of Healthcare Workers and from Rogers Behavioral Health. 

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A federal judge in Milwaukee rejected a bid from Rogers Behavioral Health Tuesday to block a pair of union elections scheduled for Wednesday at Rogers mental health clinics in West Allis and Madison.

The decision sets the stage for votes to go forward at both clinics. About 35 employees at Rogers’ Madison clinic and about 68 at the West Allis clinic will vote Wednesday on whether to be represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

Rogers, based in Oconomowoc, had argued that the union election should cover all 13 Rogers facilities in Wisconsin — not just the two where employees had actively organized. But in a direction of election issued April 14, the NLRB regional director whose jurisdiction includes Wisconsin said those two clinics alone were each appropriate bargaining units.

On Monday, Rogers lawyers filed a lawsuit to block both elections. U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman denied the mental health nonprofit’s petition for a temporary restraining order Tuesday after an online hearing that ran a little more than 40 minutes.

“I don’t think that they’ve established unconstitutional irreparable harm,” Adelman said of Rogers’ lawyers.

The Rogers lawsuit echoed a recent line of legal challenges that have sought to unravel the National Labor Relations Board — the 91-year-old agency created under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his administration’s New Deal to secure rights for workers and help the U.S. recover from the Great Depression.

One of Rogers’ lawyers, Aron Karabel, argued that the members of the NLRB itself as well as the regional director who issued the union election order are unconstitutional because they aren’t subject to dismissal by the president, violating the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution.

Similar arguments have been made by other businesses, including Amazon and SpaceX, but the U.S. Supreme Court has not endorsed the claim.

Karabel’s colleague, Hannah Fitzgerald, argued that under Wisconsin law, the NLRB regional director had engaged in “tortious interference” with existing employment contracts for some of the Rogers employees who would be included in the union election bargaining unit. For that reason as well as other reasons, the election could cause “irreparable harm” to Rogers, Fitzgerald asserted.

Representing the NLRB, lawyer Craig Ewasiuk said that a Supreme Court ruling 82 years ago established that individual contracts “may not be availed of or to defeat or delay the procedures prescribed by the National Labor Relations Act” to further collective bargaining.

“The Supreme Court has spoken unambiguously on this question, and you simply can’t bring tortious interference acts against the NLRB for running elections,” Ewasiuk said.

Karabel argued that Rogers’ case was not about collective bargaining — which would prevent the federal court from acting until after final action by the NLRB — and for that reason, the court was an immediately appropriate venue.

The NLRB lawyer rejected that argument. ‘’The employer is essentially trying to stop the board’s proceedings from resolving this underlying labor dispute,” Ewasiuk said.

Staunch resistance to the union

Rogers Behavioral Health has mental health clinics and hospitals in 10 states. Employees are already represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers at four clinics — three in California and one in Philadelphia, Pa. — and at three of those, the union was recognized voluntarily.

But in its home state of Wisconsin, Rogers has taken a much different posture.

Three employees were fired shortly after the union campaigns went public, according to the union, and the NUHW has filed unfair labor practice charges claiming the firings were illegal retaliation for union support.

Rogers has declined to discuss the firings as confidential personnel decisions but has stated they were not in violation of any laws.

From when employees first notified Rogers management of their desire for union representation, however, Rogers has posted notices and issued statements declaring that the mental health nonprofit doesn’t want  union representation for the West Allis and Madison employees.

“Many of your colleagues, your leaders, and I strongly believe that this union is not in the best interests of you, your family or our patients,” said one notice, stating it was from clinic leaders but without a name attached, that was shared with the Wisconsin Examiner. “We believe you should vote no and allow our team the opportunity for positive and direct collaborations.”

In March, Rogers’ executive director of marketing and communications, Maureen Remmel, responded to a question from the Examiner about the difference between Rogers’ responses at its California and Pennsylvania clinics and its handling of the union campaigns in Wisconsin

“While we work in good faith with the NUHW in California and Pennsylvania, our integrated system in Wisconsin is different,” Remmel said in an email message  March 17. “A direct relationship with our Wisconsin team members best serves employees, patients, and the company.”

At an NLRB hearing in February to establish the appropriate bargaining units for the Wisconsin clinics, Rogers’ lawyer argued that flexibility across multiple facilities was important and necessitated allowing all 13 Wisconsin locations to vote on union membership.

A statement attributed to the organization as a whole that Remmel sent April 16, after the election order was issued, asserted, “A union is not right for Rogers Behavioral Health in Wisconsin because it jeopardizes our ability to work together to solve problems quickly and flexibly.”

Jennifer Hadsall, the NLRB regional director, wrote in her analysis that there was little evidence of “functional integration” across the system to overcome the presumption that the two facilities where employees had organized were by themselves appropriate bargaining units.

Hadsall also rejected Rogers’ argument that certain employees were supervisors and therefore not eligible to be part of their facility’s bargaining unit.

Professional consultants

Starting in early February, Rogers has hired consultants to assist in managing its response to the union campaigns, according to LaborLab, a nonprofit based in Helena, Montana. LaborLab monitors the industry of consultants who advise and assist employers in responding to union drives.

Under the federal Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, employers and the consultants they hire to persuade employees “directly or indirectly” about unionizing must regularly file reports with the federal government. Employers file LM-10 reports and consultants file LM-20 reports as well as LM-21 annual financial reports.

While advocates for greater disclosure complain that those reports are often late or incomplete, they offer some information about those businesses.

LaborLab has identified three consultants working for Rogers since early February, when pro-union employees in Madison and West Allis petitioned for voluntary recognition. Two were identified through their LM-20 reports and one was named by union supporters during a radio interview with WORT-FM, the listener-sponsored community radio station in Madison.

LaborLab has estimated the consultants’ fees total about $50,000 a week, or more than $325,000 through April 1. Those don’t include the cost of attorneys representing the business on legal matters connected with the union campaign or “internal costs” that LaborLab’s calculations impute to employees assigned to directly address the union organizing effort.

“It’s hard to be precise because there are a lot of variables in these campaigns,” said Teke Wiggin, LaborLab’s strategic coordinator. “But we think that workers should have some general sense of how much is being invested in these campaigns.”

Wiggin said in an interview that some consultants interact only with corporate managers and executives, while others hold meetings with employees themselves, an action that requires disclosure in federal reports.

“They take arguments that have been crafted by industrial psychologists to sow as much fear and doubt about the value of unionization as possible,” Wiggin said.

In a letter sent to Rogers Feb. 25, 20 local and state elected officials criticized the organization for having “hired union busters” and urged the organization’s CEO to “immediately stop wasting patient care dollars on union busters paid to try to intimidate workers from organizing.”

Rogers did not respond to a question from the Examiner about its use of consultants in the organizing campaign.

In a response to the elected officials that was signed by “Rogers Behavioral Health,” the organization said it has “retained consultants to better understand and address the concerns shared by our employees and to raise awareness about their rights and the election process.”

Messages to employees

In a media statement April 16 after the election was scheduled, Rogers reiterated the organization’s position that a union was not the right choice for its employees and its intention to appeal the regional director’s finding after the election.

The day before, Rogers management emailed employees with a similar message, stating, “We are disappointed and disagree with this decision and are appealing to the full NLRB in Washington, D.C.”

The final line of the message was, “Regardless of the election outcome, bargaining will not start with the union until all appeals have been exhausted.”

The Wisconsin Examiner was provided screenshots of the message.

Employees involved in the union campaigns said that shortly after it landed in their inboxes, that message was remotely deleted, possibly because it was recalled.

On Monday, Rogers distributed another letter at both the West Allis and Madison locations that took up about a page and a half.

“We want to be direct with you today: change is coming to Rogers,” states the letter, photos of which were shared with the Examiner. “You will see it. We are working on it. That is why we are asking you to vote no on Wednesday and allow leadership 12 months to demonstrate to you, your colleagues, patients and families our commitment to making Rogers better than ever.”

Under federal labor law, if a majority of employees vote against a union in a representation election, the employees must wait at least 12 months before seeking a union again.

The members of Rogers’ leadership team “have heard you,” the letter states. “We know that there are things we can do and must do better.”

The letter’s final paragraphs reiterated both the vow to improve relations and a plea to vote against the union.

“The leadership team is committed to doing better. Today we are asking you to please give us 12 months. Vote ‘no’ in the upcoming election and give us a chance to show our commitment in action. If we do not come through for you, the law gives you the right to hold another election. Rogers will honor your choice in that election.

“Please vote ‘no’ on April 22. Vote to hold Rogers leadership accountable.”

Federal court records show Rogers filed its lawsuit to block the vote the same day that employees received that letter.

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Employees of two Wisconsin mental health clinics, both part of a national mental health nonprofit based in Oconomowoc, will vote next week on whether to join a union after what has become a highly contested campaign.

Almost two months after a four-day National Labor Relations Board hearing, the NLRB’s Minneapolis-based regional director this week ordered the elections at the clinics, operated by Rogers Behavioral Health in West Allis and Madison.

In the April 14 order, Regional Director Jennifer A. Hadsall rejected Rogers’ position that the election should include all 13 Wisconsin Rogers locations. Hadsall instead directed elections at the West Allis and Madison clinics, where a majority of employees had signed up with the National Union of Healthcare Workers, according to the union.

Union supporters at the Wisconsin clinics have said they decided to seek union representation in response to increased caseloads, changes in how employee productivity was measured and a reduction in individual time that therapists and other providers could spend with patients.

“All of the changes were about increasing the number of patients that were coming into the building,” Stephani Lohman, a nurse practitioner, told the Wisconsin Examiner earlier this year. “It did not seem to have a cohesive plan and no plan would be communicated.”

The NUHW is based in California. After employees at a Rogers clinic in Walnut Creek, California, organized in 2023 and elected the union to represent them in 2023, they negotiated their first contract in 2024.

Employees at two other California clinics and at a clinic in Philadelphia also joined the union, which those three clinics voluntarily recognized.

Union supporters at the West Allis and Madison clinics each sought voluntary recognition of the union after organizing over the past year.

In Wisconsin, however, Rogers declined voluntary recognition, and the employees then filed petitions with the NLRB for union elections.

Lohman worked at the West Allis clinic, known as Lincoln Center, and was among those active in organizing the union. She said she and two other employees were fired after submitting the petition to be recognized. The union has filed unfair labor practice charges claiming that the three firings were in retaliation for union organizing, which is against the law.

In response to an inquiry in March about the firings, Maureen Remmel, Rogers’ executive director for marketing and communications, told the Wisconsin Examiner via email, “We do not comment on confidential personnel matters and have acted in compliance with applicable law.”

Hadsall held a hearing that took place Feb. 23 through Feb. 27 at the NLRB’s office in Milwaukee, where Rogers’ lawyers argued for a bargaining unit of 1,383 employees encompassing all Rogers locations in Wisconsin — three hospitals in the Milwaukee area and 10 outpatient clinics around the state.

Rogers had “a heavy burden” to overcome the presumption that a single facility is an appropriate bargaining unit, Hadsall wrote in her order this week, and she found that management had  failed to do so.

The evidence in how Rogers is organized and supervises its employees was insufficient to overcome a general presumption in U.S. labor law — that a union bargaining unit representing a single health care facility in a larger network or organization is considered appropriate.

Evidence in the case showed that neither of the two clinics had “lost their separate identity such that a single-facility union would be inappropriate,” Hadsall wrote.

Union elections for about 68 employees at the West Allis Lincoln Center clinic and about 35 at the Madison clinic are scheduled for Wednesday, April 22.

For employees at both clinics who have been seeking union representation, the decision was welcome news.

“I’m thrilled and beyond thrilled,” said Erin Quinlan, a behavioral health specialist at the Madison clinic. “It really just vindicated how firm our stance is and how confident we feel about organizing a union and doing so for the Madison clinic.”

Lohman said she and other West Allis employees who have been seeking union representation were pleased as well.

“I’ve just been feeling really overjoyed,” Lohman said Thursday. She and the other fired employees will be able to vote in the West Allis union election, she said.

Rogers Behavioral Health has announced the organization will appeal the order to the full NLRB in Washington, but that will not forestall next week’s voting.

“We are disappointed with the NLRB regional office’s decision to allow separate bargaining units given that Rogers Behavioral Health operates as one unified system across Wisconsin,”  Rogers said in a statement, which Remmel delivered via email. The statement asserted that patients “can move seamlessly between different levels of care, supported by providers who collaborate across locations.”

In her order, however, Hadsall found that there was not sufficient evidence of “functional integration” across the system to overcome the presumption that a single facility is appropriate for a bargaining unit.

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The total number of Wisconsin jobs fell in February compared with January and also fell from the number in February 2025, the state labor department reported Thursday.

Meanwhile, employment was up in February compared with January, while it declined from February a year ago. The percentage of people who reported they were unemployed in February but actively seeking work rose from the previous month, however.

“I would hesitate to say, based on what we’ve seen so far with employment over [the past] year, whether we’re seeing a downward or an uptrend,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the Department of Workforce Development office of economic advisors, in a briefing Thursday.

Shifting tariff policies and general economic volatility “are introducing a lot of noise in the economy right now,” Hodek said.

According to DWD, 3.02 million Wisconsinites were employed in February, an increase of 1,500 from January but a drop of 11,900 from February 2025. The unemployment rate, which includes people who report they are actively seeking work, rose to 3.4% in February from 3.3% in January.

There were 3.02 million nonfarm jobs in Wisconsin in February — down 10,500 from January and down 20,200 from February 2025.

“Any time we see a job drop it’s something we definitely want to pay attention to,” Hodek said. Current indicators are mixed and make it “difficult to parse where the economy is going,” he added. “You’ve got the [stock] market going one direction and you’ve got real consumer spending kind of flattening.”

There were 153,700 construction jobs in February, a gain of 800 from January and 10,200 from February 2025. There were 451,500 manufacturing jobs in February, down 100 from January and down 8,600 from February 2025.

“That’s related to multiple factors,” Hodek said, but declines “don’t always indicate the health of the industry.”

Automation, productivity increases and outsourcing can all lead to job reductions, he said. But the shrinkage can also reflect difficulty hiring, because the jobs numbers only show people who are working, not vacancies that employers are trying to fill, so “it can look like employment’s going down in manufacturing.”

Wisconsin’s job and employment numbers for January, February and March were delayed due to the annual adjustments made to the formulas that economists use to calculate them. Those delays were exacerbated by the federal shutdown in October and early November.

Wisconsin’s January numbers were released on April 2, and the March numbers will be released in two weeks on April 29.

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