(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Microsoft’s $3.3 billion data center project in Mount Pleasant will require up to 8.4 million gallons of water per year, according to data released Wednesday by the city of Racine.

Racine officials on Wednesday released the records related to the projected usage of water at Microsoft’s planned artificial intelligence data center seven months after they’d been initially requested by a Milwaukee-based water quality advocacy group and days after a lawsuit was filed to force their publication. 

The data center is currently under construction at the site initially planned to hold the Foxconn manufacturing plant in Mount Pleasant and expected to begin operation next year. 

Data centers require a huge amount of energy to keep running and use a significant amount of water to keep the servers inside cool. The water for the data center is being provided by the Racine Water Utility under an agreement with the village of Mount Pleasant. The Foxconn site has already been subject to water-based controversy after concerns were raised that water would be diverted from Lake Michigan to the area. 

The Great Lakes watershed around the southwest tip of Lake Michigan does not extend very far off the shoreline, meaning any water taken to Mount Pleasant is taking water away from the Great Lakes — threatening the agreements in the Great Lakes compact and risking the creation of a precedent across the eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces along the Great Lakes shoreline. 

According to the Racine projections, the first phase of operations on the data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. In later phases, as more substations go online, the campus would use 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons per year.

An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds about 660,000 gallons of water. Lake Michigan holds 1.3 quadrillion gallons of water. 

On Monday, Madison-based Midwest Environmental Advocates filed a lawsuit on behalf of Milwaukee Riverkeepers to release the requested water use projections, which the water organization had initially asked for in a February open records request. 

“Data centers will have major implications for Wisconsin’s environment. Our ability to understand the impacts and protect our water resources depends on open and transparent government,” Milwaukee Riverkeeper’s Cheryl Nenn said. 

Across the country and Wisconsin, data centers such as the site in Mount Pleasant have been proliferating as tech companies race to develop AI tools and chatbots. In some cases, the tech companies have required local governments to sign non-disclosure agreements that cover information beyond proprietary secrets and include potential community impacts. 

City officials said Wednesday the request took so long to complete because the city was making sure that providing the information did not violate a contractual agreement. 

“Open and transparent government is not optional; it is essential to public trust,” Racine Mayor Cory Mason said in a statement. “While we needed time to ensure that we handled this request responsibly and in compliance with legal agreements, we believe transparency is paramount. The information has been released, and we remain committed to making all relevant government records accessible so our community can see how decisions are made and resources are used.”

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Amtrak's Borealis passenger train connecting Chicago to Minneapolis through Milwaukee arrives at the Columbus, Wisconsin, station on Friday, Sept. 12. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

On a sunny Friday afternoon, a half-dozen lawmakers and at least as many passenger rail advocates boarded an Amtrak train in Columbus, Wisconsin, for a 90-minute ride across the countryside.

Their destination was Tomah, where they spent another 90 minutes talking about why Wisconsin should expand train service and how to make that happen.

The event was a debut of sorts for the state Legislature’s Passenger Rail Caucus, a body that began coming together this year.

There are many reasons to expand passenger rail service in Wisconsin, according to Rep. Lori Palmeri (D-Oshkosh), a principal organizer for the group.

She sees economic and environmental benefits to rail travel — moving more people with less pollution per individual. But it also provides options for people no longer interested in driving but who don’t want to be stuck at home.

Rail service can address “the spatial mismatch between where people are living and where people are either working or going to school or getting their health care or recreating,” Palmeri said in an interview. “When I talk to seniors, they want to have that access to not just urban centers, but some of our second-class cities, too.”

An adult granddaughter of hers has epilepsy and will never be able to drive, Palmeri said, but others in that age group appear to drive less for other reasons.

“Fewer and fewer younger people are investing either in the learning piece” — driver training — “or the financial piece of car ownership,” she said, especially as cars get more expensive to own.

In short, for lawmakers in the passenger rail caucus and for the advocates encouraging them, passenger rail service is more than a nostalgic indulgence. It’s an underappreciated alternative to cramped airliners and congested highways.

‘Our time to stand up’

And it’s an alternative that Susan Foote-Martin, vice president of communications for the Wisconsin Association of Railroad Passengers, says will require a concerted campaign to gain more attention and support.

“We feel now is our time to stand up, and to speak up, and to ante up for the things that mean something to us,” Foote-Martin told the lawmakers and other advocates gathered in a Tomah restaurant’s banquet room.

“If we don’t do it, it’s not going to happen,” she said. “We can’t wait for a posse to come riding out of the sunset to save us. We are the posse.”

The caucus is building up steam while the view ahead is murky.

Amtrak’s Borealis train, which makes round trips once a day from Chicago to the Twin Cities through southern and western Wisconsin, has lived up to early projections, transporting nearly 230,000 riders in the first year of  its launch in May 2024.

Meanwhile, a  bus service connecting the Amtrak station in  Milwaukee to Green Bay through the Fox Valley will end abruptly Oct. 1. The service was funded through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT), but money to continue the route was left out of the 2025-27 state budget.

“We’re working with WisDOT to do more, but to do more takes funding,” Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari told the assembled group. “And if there’s a way to put that back together again or find funding for it, we’re at WisDOT’s disposal and yours to go hunt that down.”

The bus service offered, in effect, proof of concept for a long desired  revival of passenger rail service to Green Bay. That proposed extension is the farthest along in development and planning of various Amtrak extension proposals in Wisconsin, according to Larry Rueff, who represents NEWRails, a nonprofit formed to promote the Green Bay extension. (The first three letters in the name stand for Northeast Wisconsin.)

The line is ready for the next phase in planning. “We need to know that it’s going to be funded, or it won’t get any further — and that’s going to be bad for Green Bay and bad for the rest of the state’s projects,” Rueff said in an interview.

High-speed memories

There’s no shortage of other ideas. Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said he’d like to see passenger service into Beloit some day. Rep. Vincent Miresse (D-Stevens Point) would like to see service connecting Stevens Point and other central Wisconsin communities to the Twin Cities through the Chippewa Valley.

“I just want to see passenger rail as being a viable alternative to everyone having to have a car right now,” Miresse told the Wisconsin Examiner. “I think people would like the opportunity to travel to Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison and be able to hop on a train and not have the burden of having a vehicle.”

The choice of Tomah for Friday’s discussion harkened back to the high-speed rail project approved during former Gov. Jim Doyle’s second term. After Scott Walker was elected governor in 2010 promising to cancel the project, Doyle killed it just before leaving office at the end of that year.

The project’s demise also put off plans to put a passenger stop in Madison. Columbus, the nearest Amtrak station, is 27 miles northeast of the capital city.

“As someone who works in Madison almost every week, it was a great disappointment to lose that high speed rail option,” Rep. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), who also came to the Tomah meeting, said in an interview. “There are times when I’m driving to Madison and I think, ‘I could be on a train working right now.’”

Tomah had begun planning an intermodal hub as part of the high speed rail project. While that plan died, Tomah City Administrator Nick Morales told the group the city has seen bustling tourism and regularly draws in traffic to the region’s two military bases and a veterans hospital.

“We struggle with a lot of our transportation needs, and increased rail services to Tomah would greatly benefit us,” he said.

Getting Republicans on board

The lawmakers and advocates who gathered in Tomah contend that expanding rail service in Wisconsin should be a bipartisan objective, but only Democratic legislators were on hand for Friday’s event.

The late Republican Rep. Ed Brooks is reported to have proposed a railroad caucus years ago. “This was a dream of his,” Billings told the group, recalling fondly how she got to know Brooks early in her Assembly career.

Palmeri said she has reached out to several GOP lawmakers, some of whom have put their names on railroad-related bills in the past. “The hope was that we would have folks on the other side of the aisle also join us and hear the same information,” she said after the session was over Friday.

The canceled bus connection to Green Bay was among the casualties when the Republican majority on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee  removed $15 million for passenger rail service from Gov. Tony Evers’ draft budget.

The new passenger rail caucus is working on a bill that would make up for what was lost. There isn’t yet a draft, but Palmeri doesn’t expect it simply to be a rewrite of the Evers proposal.

“No disrespect to what was put in the budget, but I think there are some folks who are interested in going big or going home,” she said.  

Such legislation is unlikely to advance without support from Republicans, however. Asked what it would take to persuade GOP lawmakers to take it up, Palmeri answered, “them not being in the majority.”

So does that mean the developing legislation is intended for Democratic campaign messaging in the 2026 legislative elections?

“To a certain extent,” Palmeri said. “But I do also have the belief — maybe somewhat naïve — that there are people on the other side of the aisle who know this is good for their districts and who know that this could be their future — right?”

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Children at The Playing Field, a Madison child care center that participates in the federal Head Start program. (Courtesy of The Playing Field)

Federal judges in Rhode Island and Washington have blocked the Trump administration from excluding people without legal immigration status from a group of federal programs, including Head Start early childhood education.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Rhode Island halted a broad array of rules based on the new immigration restrictions from taking effect. Wisconsin was one of 21 states and the District of Columbia to join that lawsuit.  

Reuters reported that a White House statement said the administration expected a higher court to reverse the decision.

On Thursday, a federal judge in the state of Washington ordered the Trump administration to pause a requirement that Head Start early childhood education programs exclude families without legal immigration status. That ruling came in a case brought by Head Start groups in four states, including Wisconsin.

Head Start programs were included in a broader federal directive that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued July 10 listing federally funded “public benefits” that must exclude immigrants without legal status under the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

Certain programs, such as Medicaid, have been required to verify lawful immigration status for participants. But since 1998, the federal government has considered a range of programs exempt that are generally open to all in a community, according to Reuters.

The July HHS order revoked the 1998 policy and closed the door to immigrants lacking legal status for Head Start along with a collection of programs providing mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training and other assistance.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy issued a preliminary injunction that halted orders from HHS as well as the departments of Education, Labor and Justice based on the policy shift.

“The Government’s new policy, across the board, seems to be this: ‘Show me your papers,'” McElroy wrote in her order.

McElroy wrote that the administration acted “in a rushed way, without seeking comment from the public or interested parties,” likely violating the federal Administrative Procedures Act.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Martinez issued a temporary restraining order directing HHS not to apply the immigration restriction to Head Start programs.

Head Start programs have never been required to determine the immigration status of families in the program since it started nearly 60 years ago, according to Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

The Wisconsin association joined the lawsuit against the HHS order filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of Head Start programs in the states of Washington, Illinois and Pennsylvania as well as advocacy groups in California and Oregon.

“This ruling affirms what we know to be both right within the law and right for communities,” Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner on Friday. “Keeping eligible Head Start Families in the program is the best outcome for Wisconsin. Kids are safer and it keeps Wisconsin working.”

Martinez wrote in a 26-page opinion focused on the Head Start portion in the HHS order that harms the plaintiffs warned of “are not merely speculative.” Martinez was appointed by President George W. Bush and confirmed in 2004.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs told the court that a Wisconsin Head Start program reported at least four families withdrew after the federal directive was issued. Several Pennsylvania programs reported withdrawals, one reported that it expects to have to close and another said it will have to close one of its rooms due to a drop in enrollment.

The plaintiffs’ arguments “detail confusion on how to comply with the Directive, how to verify immigration status, who status is based on, whether non-profits are exempt, difficulties in recruiting and families obtaining proper documentation, and the families’ overall fear that reporting immigration status will result in a choice between family safety and a child’s education,” Martinez wrote.

The directive has unclear guidance and has had a “chilling effect” on programs as well as on families who have relied on Head Start, resulting “in the immediate harm of childhood education loss” and “leading to long-term harms in development,” he wrote. “It also results in parents losing childcare, risking missed work, unemployment, forced dropouts, and inability to pay life expenses and support families.”

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A draft bill Democrats are circulating would repeal Wisconsin's ban on unemployment insurance for people who receive Social Security Disability Insurance payments. (Getty Images)

After a federal court decision rolled back a Wisconsin law that blocked disability payment recipients from collecting unemployment insurance, Democratic lawmakers have drafted legislation that repeals that law.

“Our job is to correct mistakes or ensure that someone’s rights aren’t taken from them. And when this statute originally passed, I think that’s exactly what it did,” said Sen. Kristin Dassler-Alfheim (D-Appleton) in a phone interview Tuesday after circulating the draft legislation earlier in the day.

“The good news is the court has come down and we now have the proper stance. Now, it’s our job to ensure that those rights aren’t infringed on again,” she said.

Dassler-Alfheim’s draft bill is co-authored by state Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee). It codifies a ruling in July by U.S. District Judge William Conley that ordered the Department of Workforce Development (DWD) to stop denying unemployment insurance applications from people who collect Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI).

Conley ruled a year ago that the 2013 Wisconsin law disqualifying Social Security Disability Insurance recipients from collecting unemployment insurance violated two federal laws: The Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act. The ruling came in response to a class-action lawsuit filed in 2021 opposing the state’s ban on jobless pay for people on SSDI.

Conley delayed imposing a remedy in his July 17, 2024, decision. While DWD never indicated plans to appeal the ruling, the department continued to enforce the 2013 law, blocking jobless pay for people on SSDI.

A year after his first decision, Conley ordered DWD to stop enforcing the law, and on Aug. 20, issued a follow-up order on behalf of two groups of people in the original lawsuit.

DWD must pay jobless benefits to applicants between Sept. 7, 2015 — when the SSDI-unemployment ban law was last revised — and July 30, 2025, who were denied because they received SSDI payments. Those applicants must demonstrate that they were eligible for unemployment insurance except for the SSDI ban, Conley wrote.

DWD must also pay back people who had originally been awarded jobless pay but were then required to return the money because they were on SSDI, the judge ordered.

Conley ruled that applicants are not eligible for state jobless pay for weeks in which they received Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that was created at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A first-term lawmaker, Dassler-Alfheim said her career in the insurance and financial industry attuned her to the issue that the SSDI ban on jobless pay raised.

“Being keenly aware when people have limitations on income is just something that I’ve always paid attention to,” Dassler-Alfheim said. “Anytime you’ve got restrictions on people . . . when they’re trying to work and something goes wrong, to not be able to give them the compensation — it’s just not right.”

The federal Social Security Administration program allows disability insurance recipients to work part-time if they are able to, and encourages them to do so under programs that ensure they do not lose their disability payments or their medical coverage under Medicaid.

When Wisconsin banned SSDI recipients from unemployment pay, however, DWD under the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker discounted the possibility that people enrolled in the federal disability program might be able to work. A DWD proposal at the time asserted that disability payment recipients who applied for unemployment insurance were probably “double-dipping” and committing “fraud.”

The law was originally enacted in 2013, then amended in 2015, also during the Walker administration. 

The law “really was discrimination,” Dassler-Alfheim said Tuesday. “There’s no reason that that should have taken place.”

DWD proposal could blunt ruling’s impact

Waiting in the wings, however, is a proposal from the current DWD staff that critics say would undo the impact of Conley’s decision.

The proposal is part of the package that the department has submitted to the state Unemployment Insurance Advisory Council — a joint labor-management body that for decades has negotiated and recommended changes to the state’s jobless pay law. DWD presented its proposals — 12 in all — to the council in August.

The department’s proposal on unemployment pay for SSDI recipients calls for offsetting an applicant’s jobless pay by the applicant’s SSDI payment, “to prevent the payment of duplicative government benefits for the replacement of lost earnings or income, regardless of an individual’s ability to work.” 

The recipient’s monthly SSDI payment would be divided into fractions allocated for each week of jobless pay, and the equivalent amount of that payment would be subtracted from the recipient’s weekly unemployment check.

For many SSDI recipients that would wipe out their jobless pay entirely, according to unemployment insurance lawyer Victor Forberger. 

For example, a person who gets $1,000 from SSDI each month and is awarded unemployment pay would have $250 deducted each week from their unemployment benefits. 

“Very few SSDI recipients have a weekly unemployment insurance benefit of more than $250,” Forberger said in an interview in July — meaning that they would probably not collect any jobless pay at all despite qualifying for it. 

In a statement Tuesday, DWD defended the proposal.

The administration of Gov. Tony Evers has three times proposed budgets that would end the ban on UI for SSDI recipients on the grounds that “denying unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to social security disability insurance (SSDI) recipients was discriminatory,” DWD’s statement said.

Those same proposals included offset provisions. DWD said that those proposals “mirrored the treatment [of] SSDI with the treatment of pensions and lump sum payments under UI law.” Those payments can similarly reduce an unemployment insurance award. 

Lawmakers on the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee threw all those changes out of the budget each time, however. 

Conley’s July 2024 opinion found barring jobless pay for SSDI recipients violated federal law, the DWD statement said. But, the department statement added, his ruling also “noted that offsets to the receipt of SSDI have been upheld by other courts.” 

Conley’s most recent orders blocked DWD from enforcing the SSDI unemployment insurance ban, “but did not order an offset,” said the DWD statement, calling the judge’s order “consistent with DWD’s policy position.”

“DWD has already begun processing payments for individuals who receive SSDI,” the statement said. “DWD will continue [to] meet the requirements of the court’s order and any legislation that is signed into law.”

Forberger said reducing jobless pay by the amount of a recipient’s SSDI payment would effectively nullify the court’s ruling, however. “It would perpetuate the discrimination,” he said. 

SSDI benefits are “a bare minimum and in some cases not even that,” Forberger said. People enrolled in SSDI and who also take jobs “need to do this work to support themselves.”

Dassler-Alfheim told the Wisconsin Examiner that she would oppose including the offset proposal in a UI revision bill. 

“If they lose that job that they have gone out of their way to get, even though they’re disabled, they certainly deserve to be compensated for their unemployment at the same rate, under the same scruples, as anybody else,” Dassler-Alfheim said.

“These are people that are doing exactly what society wants them to do — not sitting home on a disability check,” she added. “Why would we disincentivize by removing benefits if they were to lose their job for something they didn’t do?”

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Jimmy Novy, 77, hangs onto a canopy to hold himself up July 29, 2025, in Hillsboro, Wis. Novy is one of 312 permanently and totally disabled individuals in Wisconsin and has been collecting worker’s comp checks from the state since his injury in his late 20s. (Photo by Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch)

Jimmy Novy grew up on a farm with corn, cattle and chickens in Wisconsin’s smallest municipality. Yuba, in the Driftless Area northwest of Madison, covers a third of a square mile. Novy correctly quotes its population in the last census: 53.

In 1967, at age 19, married with a child, Novy got a job at the Rayovac plant in nearby Wonewoc. It made batteries used in walkie-talkies in the Vietnam War.

In his late 20s, Novy learned he had been exposed to manganese, a key component in batteries. He suffered neurological problems that affected his left leg, severely limiting his ability to walk or even maintain his balance.

“The nerves from the brain to my leg, they can’t do nothing about that,” he said.

With four children to raise, Novy turned to Wisconsin’s first-in-the-nation worker’s compensation system. After three years of legal back-and-forth, the state agreed that Novy was permanently and totally disabled (PTD), meaning he was among the worst-off of Wisconsin workers injured on the job. As a result, he qualified for worker’s comp checks for life.

But there was no guarantee of how often those checks would increase.

Now 77, widowed, remarried and using hearing aids and a cane, Novy hasn’t seen an increase in his $1,575 monthly worker’s compensation check — nor have the other more than 300 other PTD recipients — since 2016.

“I can’t make it,” Novy told Wisconsin Watch in mid-July. “I got $8 left in my checkbook right now to last me through the last week of the month.”

“The wife buys food and stuff, otherwise I’d be starving to death,” he added.

Had Novy’s worker’s comp payment kept pace with inflation, which rose 34%, he would have received nearly $21,000 more over the past nine years, according to calculations by University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Menzie Chinn.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin employers have seen their premiums for worker’s compensation insurance decrease 10 years in a row, saving them $206 million in the past year and over $1 billion since 2017, according to the Wisconsin Hospital Association, which is part of the state Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council.

Twenty-three states, including Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, provide automatic cost-of-living raises for PTD recipients. In Wisconsin, raises have been provided only when they are included in a wide-ranging worker’s compensation “agreed bill,” proposed every two years, and only if the bill becomes law.

That moment might be at hand.

The advisory council has recommended raises for PTD recipients in the next agreed bill, which is being drafted.

The bill still has to be approved by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Making history, creating PTD raises

In 1911, Wisconsin became the first state to adopt a comprehensive worker’s compensation law that was upheld as constitutional. Before that, the burden was on the worker to prove that a job injury was the employer’s fault. Now it’s a no-fault system. Workers injured on the job can receive regular payments based on their salary, plus coverage of medical bills to treat their injuries.

Wisconsin’s system has received high marks for getting injured workers back on the job quickly and for worker satisfaction in health care for their injuries.

The money for worker’s compensation checks comes from worker’s compensation insurance companies and from employers who are self-insured for worker’s comp. No tax dollars are involved.

About 21,000 people annually receive Wisconsin worker’s comp checks, the vast majority of them for a temporary period. Only about 500 people receive PTD benefits, and only 300 of them, like Novy, are eligible for raises.

That’s because the 2016 agreed bill limits raises, known as supplementary benefits, only to PTD recipients injured before Jan. 1, 2003.

How PTD raises are decided

The process that determines whether PTD raises are granted is not unlike the bargaining that an employer and a union do to reach a contract. Both sides have priorities, and there is horse trading and eventually compromise, at least on some issues.

The Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council is composed mainly of five representatives from management and five from organized labor, though it also includes nonvoting members representing insurance, health care and the Legislature.

Every odd year, the council develops a bill proposing multiple changes to worker’s comp. The process typically takes months of negotiations, said John Dipko, the council’s non-voting chair and administrator of worker’s compensation for the state Department of Workforce Development.

If approved by the Legislature and the governor, the bill becomes law the next year.

That process has produced 11 PTD raises since 1972. The 2016 raise put the maximum PTD payment at $669 per week.

‘The most severely changed’

Circumstances have left PTD recipient Scott Meyer better off financially than Novy, but delays in raises have forced Meyer to dip into savings and, as his health conditions worsen, worry about the future.

Meyer grew up outside of Milwaukee, playing in the woods and farm fields of rural Washington County. He was a member of the hockey team at West Bend West High School.

In 1993, at age 19, Meyer was working on a loading dock when a co-worker backing a semi-trailer pinned Meyer between the trailer and the dock. Meyer closed his eyes and tried to remain calm, thinking his right leg was broken.

“One of the paramedics in the ambulance thought that I was unconscious and said to the other paramedic that this was going to be his first fatality call,” Meyer recalled. “And I immediately then knew that something more major had happened.”

Meyer underwent multiple surgeries, spent more than a year in the hospital and dropped to under 100 pounds. He was left a paraplegic.

Though unable to work, Meyer became an Alpine skier in Colorado, where he now lives, competing in the 2014 Paralympics in Sochi, Russia.

Meyer, 51, said he receives about $2,300 per month from worker’s compensation – nearly $370 per month less than what he was paid on the job in 1993.

Meyer, who owns a condominium with his wife, a mental health therapist, said he has been able to live comfortably only by preserving savings, including from a one-time payout he received from his former employer for his injury. But with no raises in nine years, he has had to dip into savings to get by.

Earlier this year, both Novy in an email and Meyer in a video asked the Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council to recommend raises for PTD recipients.

“These are people whose lives are the most severely changed and are legitimately dependent upon these funds,” Meyer told Wisconsin Watch. “We’re talking about pennies on the dollar to the kind of money that is in the system.”

The process that results in PTD raises involves negotiations on a variety of worker’s compensation issues. That has made the road to another raise rocky in recent years.

Delayed raises and a possible breakthrough

The Worker’s Compensation Advisory Council’s agreed bill for 2018 would have raised the maximum weekly PTD payment to $711 from $669 and made more PTD people eligible for raises. But the bill also proposed a “fee schedule,” generally opposed by health care organizations, to limit how much health care providers can charge for worker’s comp care. The bill did not pass the Legislature.

Since then, the labor side of the advisory council continued to propose PTD raises, while the management side continued to seek a fee schedule. Wisconsin is one of only a handful of states without one. The two sides did not agree to include PTD raises in their 2020, 2022 and 2024 agreed bills.

A key barrier was cleared when a fee schedule for worker’s comp was included in the 2025-27 state budget adopted in July.

Days later, the advisory council proposed raises for current PTD recipients and made more PTD recipients eligible for raises.

Under the 2026 agreed bill, the injury date for PTD recipients to be eligible for raises would change from Jan. 1, 2003, to Jan. 1, 2020 — making an estimated 210 more people eligible for raises.

The bill would also raise the maximum weekly benefit for PTD recipients to $1,051 from $669 effective Jan. 1, 2026.

And it would add raises each Jan. 1, though those amounts would not be set until shortly before they become effective.

For individuals, the raise amounts would vary based on when they were injured.

For example, a PTD recipient injured in 1985 and receiving $535 a week would get a 57% increase to $840. The increase would amount to nearly $16,000 per year.

Once it’s drafted, the new agreed bill would need a final vote from the advisory council, which is expected in September. Then the bill would be submitted to the labor committees of the state Senate and Assembly.

Council management representatives didn’t reply to calls and emails requesting comment. Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale, the lead labor representative, said she understands the frustration over delayed raises. But she said the advisory council system, with management and labor hashing out worker’s compensation issues, provides stability.

Without it, “it would be up to the Legislature, and the whims of the political winds would determine the policy,” she said.

Dipko, the DWD administrator, said the department is sympathetic.

“We agreed that an increase is overdue,” he said.

After waiting this long, Novy isn’t sure what to think. He’s happy he and wife share a $125,000 brick house they own “with the bank,” as he puts it, and for his monthly $1,635 Social Security check, which increases each year. But he has filed for bankruptcy three times, most recently in 2020. He feels that at this stage of his life, he should be more secure, and a raise in worker’s comp would help.

“The Legislature should be — forget Republican, Democrat — just vote for what’s good,” he said.

“I can’t see how come they can’t give us a little raise every year,” he added.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.  To republish, go to the original and consult the Wisconsin Watch republishing guidelines.

Union workers in Rhode Island protest a Trump administration stop-work order at an offshore wind farm under construction in August. Friday's jobs report shows the fewest gains in August since 2010. (Photo by Laura Paton/Rhode Island Current)

The United States added only 22,000 jobs in August, and previously reported gains in June were revised down to a loss of 13,000 jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics report issued Friday morning.

The August jobs increase was the lowest for that month since 2010 in the aftermath of the Great Recession. June’s decrease was the first jobs loss since a December 2020 COVID-19 surge shuttered restaurants and hotels.

A recent Stateline analysis showed that Virginia and New Jersey may be among the states most affected by recent hiring slowdowns, based on surveys and layoff reports, while California and Texas appeared to continue job gains.

Job openings fell to a 10-month low in July, according to a separate government report issued Sept. 3, and there were more unemployed people than jobs available for the first time since 2021.

Last month’s revisions to the jobs report enraged President Donald Trump when they first appeared Aug. 1. The revisions showed the nation had 258,000 fewer jobs than initially reported in May and June.

In response, Trump declared the numbers were wrong, fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief, Erika McEntarfer. He offered as a replacement E.J. Antoni, a loyalist who has proposed suspending the jobs report entirely. Trump falsely said in a Truth Social post at the time that the revised jobs numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

Friday’s report showed August job losses in business and professional services (-17,000), government (-16,000), manufacturing (-12,000), wholesale trade (-11,700) and construction (-7,000), but gains in health care and social assistance (+46,800) and hospitality (+28,000).

The unemployment rate in August ticked up to 4.3%, from 4.2% in July and 4.1% in June. It increased the most for people with less than a high school diploma, up from 5.5% in July to 5.7% in August.

Unemployment ticked up for Black workers (to 7.5% from 7.2%) and Hispanic workers (to 5.3% from 5.0% in July). The rate went down for Asian workers (to 3.6% from 3.9%) and remained the same for white workers at 3.7%.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to add details about changes in industry job numbers and the unemployment rate.

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

LeVar Wilson, a Milwaukee glazer, describes how a project labor agreement that included requirements for local hiring made it possible for him to learn his trade and build a career. A bill to repeal a state ban on project labor agreements is part of a "Build a Stronger Wisconsin" package that Democratic lawmakers proposed Thursday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Democrats in the state Legislature began circulating draft legislation Thursday that they said would strengthen the state’s economy by supporting workers and undoing policies that undercut union-represented employees.

The package includes four bills: restoring Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, repealing a ban on project labor agreements, repealing the state’s “right to work” law, and strengthening laws against wrongly classifying employees as independent contractors.

“We know that these are popular policies that the people of Wisconsin need to be able to thrive in our state,” said Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) at a press conference in the Assembly chamber Thursday morning. “We  have all 60 members of the Assembly Democrats and the Senate Democrats signed onto these bills.”

A crowd of union members and supporters occupied the Assembly, packed in rows where the body’s leaders usually sit as well as bunched throughout the seats that lawmakers typically use during floor sessions.

One draft bill would undo Wisconsin’s “right-to-work” law enacted during former Gov. Scott Walker’s second term. The law bars employers and unions from requiring in their labor contracts that all union-represented employees pay union dues or fees to cover the union’s operational expenses.

Sen. Mark Spreitzer (D-Beloit) said the law “allows private sector workers to benefit from union protections without paying their share of union dues.” Spreitzer recalled he was in his first Assembly term when the measure was enacted in 2015 and spoke twice against it during an all-night floor session.

“Under federal law, unions are required to represent all employees in a workplace, but right-to-work laws like Wisconsin’s allow non-dues paying employees to receive the benefits of belonging to a union — such as bargain contracts for higher wages and union representation in employment disputes —without having to pay union dues,” Spreitzer said.

“That is not fair. It is well past time to return to the requirement that every union represented worker pays their dues for that privilege in Wisconsin,” he added.

Nurse Colin Gillis, a member of SEIU Wisconsin, called the law’s name “a misnomer.” Union members deride such laws as “right-to-work for less” because they tend to weaken wage gains, he said.

Right-to-work laws were first enacted in the segregated South after World War II. “Right-to-work laws were designed to divide and conquer and prevent us from joining together and increase living standards for working families from all races and backgrounds,” Gillis said. “Repealing ‘right to work for less’ will give me and my union siblings back the freedom to organize.”

A second bill would repeal another Walker-era law, enacted in 2017, that bars state and local governments from requiring contractors on public works projects to sign a project labor agreement with relevant unions. It also forbids government bids that require the bidder to have a union contract.

“Repealing the ban on project labor agreements, or PLAs, gives power to local and state governments to utilize a tool that would streamline the building process for public construction projects,” said Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson).

LeVar Wilson, a journeyman glazer represented by the Painters Union in Milwaukee, said he got his start as an apprentice 25 years ago when the Milwaukee baseball stadium, then known as Miller Park, was being built. The stadium project labor agreement guaranteed a percentage of jobs would go to Milwaukee County residents.

“I was one of those workers hired under this provision,” Wilson said. “It led me to a sustainable career that’s allowed me to raise a family of four without the struggle of poverty that I went through when I was a child.”

A third bill would increase enforcement and penalties for businesses that misclassify workers as independent contractors.

State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee) said that when employers misclassify workers, they dodge state and federal payroll taxes, evade minimum wage laws and overtime payment requirements, and don’t pay into the worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance programs.

“By avoiding these costs, dishonest employers often successfully undercut their competitors with very low bids,” Sinicki said. “In this way, misclassification harms the law-abiding employers and their employees and also the taxpayers who have to pick up the slack.”

The draft bill would increase the penalties for lawbreakers and expand outreach both to contractors and the public about misclassification.

The legislation would “level the playing field for business owners like us, who play by the rules,” said Larry Statz, a second-generation union painting contractor with 30 employees who said that he’s seen more contractors misclassify employees in recent years.

“We refuse to break the law or shortchange our workers. But it’s getting harder to compete with dishonest companies who cut corners,” Statz said. “State laws on misclassification do not have enough teeth in them, and these cheating companies too often avoid being caught.”

The fourth bill would reinstate Wisconsin’s prevailing wage law, which set a standard for what workers on state and local government projects are paid. The prevailing wage law was repealed in the state budget Walker signed in 2017.

State Sen. Bob Wirch (D-Somers) said Republican lawmakers who voted to repeal the law “promised it would save the taxpayers money. Well, the opposite has happened.”

A study published in 2020 by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute found that  in the years that followed the repeal, construction workers’ wages fell by about $2,600 a year and highway construction costs increased.

At the time the report was published, a co-author, economist Kevin Duncan, said that the findings “underscore the longstanding academic consensus” that doing away with prevailing wage requirements leads to a lower-skilled, lower-wage workforce and doesn’t save money.

“Instead, it creates new inefficiencies in the form of workforce turnover, quality, cost overruns and safety problems,” Duncan said in a news release announcing the report. 

Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said she has sought to persuade GOP Senate Majority Leader Devin Le Mahieu (R-Oostburg) to pursue bipartisan lawmaking.

“I do not know if the Senate Republicans have caucused on any of these measures, but I’d encourage them to do so,” Hesselbein said.

Neubauer said the Assembly Democrats would continue advocating for the measures, but also tacitly acknowledged that they might not advance until after the 2026 election — when Democratic leaders are hoping to flip one or both chambers.

“We will continue pushing for them as long as it takes,” Neubauer said of the bills. “And if that’s next session, so be it.”

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Sabrina Prochaska, a barista at Anodyne, tells reporters at a news conference Tuesday morning that the wages she and coworkers are paid aren't enough to live on. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin grass-roots advocates called on state lawmakers Tuesday to adopt a platform for workers that would nearly triple the state’s minimum wage, then increase it to keep pace with rising prices.

“The key here is to not leave workers behind with a poverty wage, but instead bring that living wage number up to at least $20 an hour,” said Peter Rickman, president of the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers union — MASH — at a press conference Tuesday in the state Capitol.

Wisconsin’s minimum wage is currently $7.25 an hour, the same as the federal minimum, which was last set in 2009.

The timing of Tuesday’s press conference, organized by a coalition that includes MASH, was part of the group’s message to lawmakers and to the public.

Monday was Labor Day, “when politicians issue statements celebrating the American worker, maybe even declaring their support for labor and the working class,” Rickman observed.

“But we’re here the day after Labor Day, calling on political leadership in Wisconsin to make all of those statements real,” he said. “To make work pay, to deliver for the working class majority in our state with a guarantee that no matter where we punch a clock, no matter where we bring our paychecks home, that paycheck has a living wage.”

A hotel worker named Adrienne, who did not give her last name, said the current minimum wage “keeps the pay ceiling embarrassingly low for workers at a time when housing has become less and less secure, health care is being threatened, grocery prices are at an all-time high, and educational expenses are crippling entire generations.”

Rickman told the Wisconsin Examiner Adrienne didn’t further identify herself because she works at a nonunion Milwaukee hotel that is currently being organized by MASH.

“I have to express my disappointment with the way many of our representatives have failed to show up for workers like myself,” Adrienne told reporters. “Twenty-five dollars an hour would be a wage that would allow workers to thrive and build further futures, but today we’re simply asking for a wage that will allow workers to survive.”

Sabrina Prochaska, a barista at Anodyne Coffee in Milwaukee, said her current wage of $15.81 an hour isn’t enough to cover her living expenses, including groceries, rent and health care.

“Every month my partner and I scrape together money to pay rent on our one-bedroom apartment,” Prochaska said. “And I’m stressed out every 30 days because I know half my paycheck is going to go to put a roof over our heads.”

A recent visit to urgent care was billed at more than $3,000, Prochaska said, “and the truth is I don’t know how to pay that off and I don’t know how I’m going to cover it.”

Anodyne employees voted unanimously in June for MASH to represent them. “We’re ready to do whatever it takes to win living wages at the bargaining table,” Prochaska said. “It’s time for these politicians to do what people like me do every day: Show up, do their job and take care of their people. It’s time to make work pay. It’s time for a living wage for all Wisconsin workers like me.”

In addition to MASH the coalition that sponsored Tuesday’s press includes Citizens Action Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Working Families Party/Power, along with Our Wisconsin Revolution and the Fighting Oligarchy Coalition.

Our Wisconsin Revolution grew out of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The Fighting Oligarchy Coalition is a new grass-roots organization that formed as Sanders embarked on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour to oppose the influence of billionaires in the current U.S. political environment.

The proposal outlined Tuesday hasn’t yet found its way into proposed legislation, but organizers of the campaign said they are clear on what it should include.

“We are calling on [state lawmakers] to, in collaboration with the Living Wage Coalition, draft comprehensive living wage legislation, with a $20 minimum, indexed to inflation, reduce the tip penalty, and restore local control,” Rickman said.

The “tip penalty” refers to the lower minimum wage for Wisconsin employees whose jobs make them eligible for tips — $2.33 an hour. The group also wants to repeal state laws that prevent local governments from setting labor standards.

Rickman said recent state and federal measures to abolish the tax on tips for tipped employees should not undermine the effort to stop paying tipped employees much less than the minimum wage.

“Tax policy… in lieu of wages has never done enough to increase working class household income,” he said. “It’s a scam.” All businesses, he added, “no matter what they do, [should] guarantee a living wage, not leave it up to government tax expenditures.”

Simon Rosenblum-Larson, an organizer for the Fighting Oligarchy Coalition, said the campaign to guarantee livable wages would “create real economic growth as workers here in Wisconsin spend their money here in Wisconsin instead of CEOs that take the money out of state [where] they buy houses, they put money in offshore bank accounts and trust funds for their kids.”

The campaign also lays down a marker for the 2026 elections.

In Wisconsin, 800,000 workers would see a raise if the minimum wage were increased to $20 an hour, Rosenblum-Larson said. “And we will be demanding that every legislator, Democrat or Republican, pledge their support in the 2026 election cycle for a $20 an hour minimum wage for every Wisconsinite.”

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A firefighter moves hazard fuel while working on the Bear Gulch fire this summer. Many in the wildland fire community believe the leadership team managing the fire sent crews into an ambush by federal immigration agents. (Facebook/Bear Gulch Fire 2025)

Wildland firefighters were stunned when federal immigration authorities last week raided an active wildfire response in Washington state, arresting two firefighters and sidelining crews for hours.

Wildfire veterans say the operation was nearly unprecedented, a breach in longstanding protocol that federal agents don’t disrupt emergency responders to check immigration status.

Worse, many wildfire veterans believe the management team overseeing the fire crews played a key role in handing over the firefighters to immigration authorities.

Stateline spoke to nearly a dozen firefighters, agency staffers and contractors familiar with the incident, who shared their belief that the top officials assigned to the fire deployed the crews to a remote location under false pretenses so federal agents could check their immigration status. Most of them spoke privately for fear of retaliation.

The raid has reverberated among fire crews, agency leaders and contractors. Wildfire veterans say the arrests have stoked fear and distrust among firefighters on the ground. They worry that crews may be scared to deploy if they may become a target for immigration raids.

“There’s really no way [the wildfire management team] could not have been involved,” said Riva Duncan, a former wildland fire chief who served more than 30 years with the U.S. Forest Service. “We’re all talking about it. People are wondering if they go on a fire with this team, if that could happen to them.”

Since the incident became public, the wildfire world has been abuzz with anger at that team — California Interagency Incident Management Team 7. Made up of federal, state and local fire professionals, the team was assigned to oversee the response to the Bear Gulch fire, which has burned 9,000 acres in and around Olympic National Park in Washington state.

One firefighter who was present at the raid said he is convinced that Team 7 leaders sent their crews into a trap.

“I felt beyond betrayed,” said the firefighter, who requested anonymity to protect his career. “What they did was messed up. They’d been talking in their briefings about building relationships and trust. For them to say that and then go do this is mind-boggling. It boiled my blood.”

Team 7 Incident Commander Tom Clemo, in an email, declined to comment, citing an active investigation. Tom Stokesberry, the team’s public information officer, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

According to daily Incident Action Plans filed by Team 7 and posted online, the crews had previously been digging holding lines, working to protect structures and conducting mop-up work. The two crews targeted by federal agents had not been assigned to work together in the days leading up to the raid.

Then, on Aug. 27, both crews — workers from private companies contracted to help fight the fire — were told to deploy to a staging area where they would cut firewood for the local community. The firefighter who was present at the raid told Stateline that a division supervisor told the crews he would meet them at the site, but never showed up.

After arriving at the site, the firefighter said, the crews found piles of logs, seemingly from a timber operation. Not wanting to damage a logging company’s property, they waited for a management team leader to show up with further instructions.

After an hour, unmarked law enforcement vehicles pulled up to the site and federal officials began questioning the firefighters. Duncan, the former Forest Service firefighter, said immigration agents would not have been able to access the site without help from Team 7 leaders.

“Fire areas are officially closed, very secure and there are roadblocks,” she said. “Somebody would have had to tell these agents how to get there.”

In a news release, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said its agents assisted with an investigation led by the federal Bureau of Land Management. While the agency’s release did not mention the nature of the investigation, multiple wildfire sources said the feds claimed they had uncovered fraud on time cards submitted by the crews.

Table Rock Forestry Inc., an Oregon-based company whose crew was one of the two at the scene, was allegedly subjected to the raid due to a half-hour discrepancy on a time sheet, said Scott Polhamus, secretary of the Organization of Fire Contractors and Affiliates. Table Rock Forestry is a member of the fire contractors’ group.

Multiple wildfire veterans said that time card discrepancies are not uncommon at wildfires, where crews work long days and it’s not always clear if lunch breaks or errands in town count toward working hours. Such mix-ups are typically sorted out between organizational leaders. Calling law enforcement in such a scenario is almost unheard of.

“This is not the first time a crew has been called on the carpet for maybe padding their time a bit,” Duncan said. “You deal directly with the company. It’s just absolutely mind-boggling to treat it as a criminal issue.”

After about five minutes discussing the time card issue, according to the firefighter who was present at the raid, federal agents spent the next three hours checking each firefighter’s immigration status.

The Customs and Border Protection news release announcing the immigration arrests made no mention of time sheets or any evidence that the investigation had turned up fraud. It did state that the two companies whose crews were raided had their contracts terminated by the government.

Polhamus, with the fire contractors’ group, said that claim is false. While the crews were demobilized and sent home, the feds have not actually ended the companies’ contracts or ability to accept future deployments.

A Customs and Border Protection public affairs specialist did not immediately respond to questions about the investigation, the alleged fraud or federal agents’ coordination with Team 7.

The Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the state’s lead wildfire response agency, said federal officials did not notify their state counterparts about the investigation.

“DNR was not informed of the incident until well after the fact,” said Ryan Rodruck, wildfire on-call public information officer with the agency.

Rodruck noted that the fire response was under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service. Press officers with the Forest Service did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Multiple wildfire sources said the crews would not have been sent to the staging area where they were ambushed without the knowledge of top leaders on the fire’s management team.

The two crews that were raided have a diverse mix of firefighters, many of them Hispanic. One of the crews has many foreign workers who are legally in the country on H-2B visas. Duncan, the former Forest Service firefighter, said it was likely not a coincidence that two crews with many brown-skinned members were targeted in the raid.

Two of the firefighters were arrested, federal officials said, for being in the country illegally.

One of the firefighters who was arrested is represented by Innovation Law Lab, an Oregon-based legal group that defends refugees and immigrants. Isa Peña, the group’s director of strategy, said the Department of Homeland Security has not revealed the whereabouts of their client.

The firefighter, who Peña declined to name, has been in the U.S. since he was four years old and served as a firefighter for the past three years. Immigration advocates are alarmed that the raid was potentially arranged by California Interagency Incident Management Team 7, the leaders charged with overseeing the wildfire response.

“There certainly is concern if that is the case that individuals are being handed over to immigration as they’re trying to keep our communities safe,” Peña said. “Conducting immigration enforcement while brave members of our community are risking their lives to protect us is really disgusting.”

Several wildland fire veterans also noted that the raid took place on Team 7’s final day in charge of the fire response, hours before a Washington team rotated in to take command. The California team headed home and left the new team to face the media scrutiny and angry firefighters in camp.

“If you’ve got ICE teams pulling your contractors out, you’d want to cut and run as soon as you can,” Polhamus said.

On a forum for wildland fire professionals on the social media platform Reddit, many expressed anger at Team 7. Firefighters also took issue with the assertion, shared by federal immigration officials, that the raid did not disrupt firefighting operations.

“It’s total bulls***,” said Duncan, the former Forest Service firefighter. “Whoever made that statement doesn’t understand the work. To take two crews off of a fire that’s only 13% contained, that seems ridiculous at that point in a fire. That does seem very unusual.”

Many wildfire veterans said that conducting a raid at the site of an active wildfire was reckless and irresponsible.

“Having people on the line that you don’t expect to be there is an issue,” said Polhamus, with the fire contractors’ group. “When you need crews and you are taking resources to check them for immigration status, we can all think of better ways to address that.”

Duncan said she’s spoken with firefighters still assigned to the Bear Gulch fire who are disgusted with the situation and want to leave.

“The three principal wildland fire values are duty, respect, integrity,” she said. “Utmost in that is taking care of your people. If you can’t trust the people you’re working with when things get hairy, that’s a concern.”

In Washington and Oregon, elected leaders have decried the raids and are pushing for more information on the status of the firefighters who were arrested. Federal immigration officials have said little since the news release announcing the arrests.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Detail of a mural inside the Madison Labor Temple building celebrating unions, worker rights and the fight for an eight-hour day. (Mural begun by artist Marcus Nickel and completed by artist Sharon Kilfoy. Wisconsin Examiner photo)

“This fight is all of labor’s fight,” Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, declared at a “solidarity dinner” for 43 immigrant workers who recently lost their jobs at a Monroe, Wisconsin cheese factory. “Even Wisconsinites who don’t know about the story, should know in a cheesemaking state we should support cheesemakers.” 

The workers, some of whom labored for more than 20 years at W&W Dairy, were told in August they would have to submit to E-Verify screening and confirm their legal status in order to continue their employment after a new company, Kansas-based Dairy Farmers of America (DFA), bought the cheese plant. They walked off the job to protest, hoping DFA, which has a policy of subjecting new hires to E-Verify screening, would exempt them because of their many years of service. The company declined, but asked the workers to return to help train their replacements, one worker said. 

The cheese plant employees I spoke with said they were still in shock, worried about supporting their families as they face the loss of pay and benefits at the end of the month.

Workers who pulled long shifts, kept the plant going through the pandemic and took pride in producing high quality, Mexican-style cheeses — queso fresco, queso blanco, quesadilla and panela — now feel betrayed. 

Their goal is no longer to return to their old jobs. Instead, they are focused on getting severance pay from W&W Dairy, which is still technically their employer until Sept. 1 — Labor Day — when DFA assumes control of the plant.

On Thursday, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the immigrant workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, wrote to W&W president Franz Hofmeister to ask that the dairy show appreciation for its longtime workers by offering them a severance package. A Labor Day picnic organized by community members to support the workers, “would be an excellent opportunity to announce that the workers and the company have resolved their differences and that workers are being given some compensation,” Neumann-Ortiz wrote. “This would give the workers a chance to thank you publicly and provide some healing and closure.”

W&W’s success was propelled by its loyal workforce — fewer than 100 people who knew how to do multiple jobs in the plant and switched roles to keep things running smoothly. The quality of the product attracted a high-profile buyer. 

“The growth trajectory for the Hispanic cheese market is more than three times that of the cheese category,” Ken Orf, president of DFA’s Cheese, Taste and Flavors Division, told the trade publication Cheese Reporter, in an article about the benefit to the company of its “strategic acquisition” of W&W, which puts it in a “stronger position for growth with this important dairy category.”

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Hispanic employees of the plant.

Bibiana Gonzalez, a child care provider and community leader in the Monroe area, said she liked the term “essential workers” when she first heard it. The W&W workers felt they were essential to their employer’s success, and put in long hours during the pandemic, when other people were staying home to protect their health. But “unfortunately, people confuse essential workers with workers who can be exploited,” Gonzalez said.

“They want to toss these workers in the street just for being immigrants,” said Voces de la Frontera organizer Pablo Rodriguez.

DFA wants to distance itself from any thorny political issues around immigration. In a statement to WKOW Channel 27 news, the company asserted it had a goal “to retain 100% of the W&W workforce,” but that “as part of the hiring process to become DFA employees, all W&W workers and other applicants were notified of the need to provide documents to complete both an I-9 form and the E-verify process.” Failing to produce the proper documents, unfortunately, would mean “DFA’s ability to offer employment was impacted.”

Using cold, passive bureaucratic language, DFA casts it as a regrettable accident that its E-Verify policy rendered nearly half the cheese plant’s employees ineligible to continue working there. But as a cooperative with 5,000 dairy farm members, it’s impossible DFA leadership is unfamiliar with its industry’s heavy reliance on workers who don’t have papers.

In Wisconsin, where DFA has 399 member farms and four dairy manufacturing plants, an estimated 70% of the dairy workforce is made up of immigrants who cannot get E-Verifiable legal work papers.

In dairy, as in other year-round, nonseasonal industries, immigrants who make up the majority of the work force are ineligible for U.S. work visas. Congress has simply failed to create a visa for year-round jobs in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, food service and other industries that rely on immigrant labor.

Far from being a drag on the economy, immigrant workers who lack legal authorization are heavily recruited by U.S. employers and “supercharge economic growth,” according to a new Center for Migration Studies research brief. The research brief shows that 8.5 million undocumented workers in the U.S. contribute an estimated $96.7 billion annually in federal, state and local taxes, “filling roles vital to critical industries.”

The brief also warns that mass deportations could cause critical workforce shortages. No one knows that better than Wisconsin dairy farmers, who would go out of business overnight if their mostly immigrant workforce was deported.

Union members who came out to support the W&W workers Tuesday night embraced the idea that all workers are in the same boat, are ill served by an authoritarian, bullying Trump administration, and will do better if they band together.

That’s the whole idea of solidarity: Working people need to unite to protect their common interests against the rich and powerful, who will run roughshod over all of us if they can. Expanding on that unifying message, Al Hudson, lay leader of the Union Presbyterian Church in Monroe, whose congregation supports the W&W workers, brought his social justice gospel to the union hall.

“We are proud to be a gathering place for the Green County Hispanic community,” Hudson said of his church. “We’re proud to do our part to be a Matthew 25 church,” he added, referring to the Bible verse in which Jesus calls on the faithful to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and visit those in prison. “This is what churches are supposed to do,” Hudson said. “I admire your courage,” he told the displaced W&W workers, pledging to continue to “walk with you and support you in your struggle as long as you want us there.”

The union members in the hall cheered. They applauded the W&W workers, they applauded speeches about solidarity among working people of every race and ethnic background. They seemed enlivened by the chance to do something to help.

The warm feeling of pulling together to resist the violent bigotry of the anti-immigrant Trump administration, recognizing the common struggle among all working people, was uplifting.

“Solidaridad!” shouted Gundlach, and the mostly gringo crowd of unionists shouted back, “Solidaridad!” 

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Protesters show support for immigrant workers in Monroe, Wisconsin, who walked off the job at a cheese-making plant to protest changes in policy made by the operation's new owners. (Photo by Bryan Pfeifer/Wisconsin Bailout the People Movement)

Known as the “Gateway to Cheese Country” and the “Cheese Capital of the USA,” the community of Monroe is a central part of Wisconsin’s dairy history. Besides this fame, the town of 10,000 or so also shares a lot with other small towns in the Midwest. Drive around the city’s courthouse square and you’ll see the offices of local lawyers, some banks and a few bars.

One thing that sets Monroe apart is the area’s relatively recent influx of immigrants.

According to the Applied Population Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Green County, where Monroe is located, has experienced a 229% increase in Latinos from 2000 to 2019. That growth has not been accompanied by a surge in murders, robberies, pet-eatings or any other crimes that the current administration has leveled against migrants. Instead Monroe has seen a rise in the number of Mexican restaurants and bilingual masses at the local Catholic church, as well as hardworking community members hoping to make a better life for themselves. 

Which makes the recent events at Monroe’s W&W milk processing plant especially infuriating. Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) acquired W&W earlier this month , and workers describe an  ownership philosophy vastly different from the positive work environment and commitment to employees they experienced under  the previous owners. Short of formally firing the workers employed there, DFA instituted the E-Verify system as part of their management plan, possibly to avoid the Trump administration’s destructive crackdowns. While this system allows employers to confirm the employment authorization of new hires, employees taking part in the walkout say that in contrast to the previous owners, DFA is requiring verification of all employees, even those who have been there 10-plus years. Not surprisingly, DFA’s decision has triggered a strike and the formation of a legal assistance fund for workers who most likely will lose their jobs after years at the plant.

Across rural America

It’s not an isolated instance; immigrants are being unjustly targeted in similar ways elsewhere in rural America. In Long Prairie, Minnesota, a town much like Monroe, meat processing workers, many of whom received legal status to work with the humanitarian parole program that the Biden administration created for people experiencing potential violence or harm in Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, or Haiti, had their permits revoked by Trump. Hundreds of workers also lost the legal right to work in the United States at a JBS pork production facility in Ottumwa, Iowa, as the current government ended their Temporary Protection Status (TPS). Like humanitarian parole, TPS, which began in 1990, grants people from certain countries work permits who flee disasters like hurricanes or wars.

Throughout the Midwest, milk processing and meat packing firms in rural areas constitute an agro-industrial archipelago where workers, many of whom are immigrants, play a key role in making our food system operate. But instead of being rewarded for years of hard work, immigrants face persecution. Insisting on programs like E-Verify — a voluntary system with documented shortcomings — and removing legal protections terrorize hardworking people. Immigrants and their families deserve better, including legal pathways to remain and work in the country.

In a nutshell, revoking legal protections unfairly turns workers into criminals by making them ineligible to work here. More to the point, these tactics are par for the course when it comes to the current administration’s cruel, underhanded and racist approach to enforcing our country’s outdated immigration system.

This toxic mix of cruelty and racial profiling is on display when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrest immigrants at courthouses after their asylum cases are dismissed, making them vulnerable for deportation. The racial profiling is even more blatant when migrants are stopped outside schools or at Home Depot parking lots because of how they look and where they are. Some get thrown to the ground and handcuffed just because they question the reason they are being detained.

An endless vicious cycle

The problem with such tactics — aside from the ethical and legal problems of encouraging government agents to trample on people’s constitutional rights — is efficiency. Immigration hardliners and Trump loyalists like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller made it a goal for ICE to fill the for-profit deportation complex with 3,000 arrests per day, having no qualms separating families, arresting children or people who have been model citizens for decades.

ICE has a sordid history of workplace enforcement actions in the past that have proven widely unpopular and non-productive.

We can go back to the Bush administration’s mass raids in places like Worthington, Minnesota, and Postville, Iowa, to show how ICE agents’ large-scale enforcement actions in rural communities tear families apart and leave communities with a long process to heal culturally and economically. What we know over a decade later is that arresting and deporting hundreds of people in such ways does not lead to U.S. citizen workers taking the positions formerly  held by immigrants, but the deported people being replaced by, well, another round of immigrants.

But for Trump 2.0, plans for the agro-industrial archipelago are different. Instead of staging mass actions to arrest workers, the government is doing this work digitally. Put otherwise, a faceless bureaucracy revokes programs and permits, giving a contrived legal pretext for ICE to enter communities and arrest people.

Let’s be clear — immigrant workers at these places were trying to “do it the right way.” But this government effectively took the legal carpet from under them as they were trying to scrape a living together for themselves and their families. To threaten these people with deportation is the ultimate in punching down, terrorizing hardworking and community-building people we should be welcoming instead of demonizing.

Real immigration policy reform does not underhandedly manufacture undocumented people, or target people who contribute to the economy, but involves doing the hard work of creating fair, workable policy in Congress. Nor should immigrants be welcomed on a whim of the administration as was the case when white South Africans were given refugee status while suspending protections for thousands of others. Why this special treatment? Most people seeking refugee status are people of color — the South Africans are white.

There are various serious initiatives currently in Congress that could actually improve the lives of immigrants. The bipartisan Dignity Act provides a pathway for citizenship for DREAMers (youth who came to the U.S. without authorization and either attend college or plan to do so) and a work permit system for all other undocumented people. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act puts farm workers and their families on a pathway to legalization. California U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla’s more sweeping Renewing Immigration Provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929 grants lawful permanent resident status —  green cards — to people who have lived in the U.S. continuously for at least seven years and  do not have a criminal record.

Immigrants come to this country for a variety of reasons, including suffering the effects of flawed trade deals, as well as experiencing war and famine. Many continue to suffer here, working jobs that are ill-paid and dangerous in places like Monroe and Long Prairie. Our current government oppresses them further with draconian and dishonest tactics, scoring cheap political points instead of engaging in actual law enforcement. 

Those among us who really care about public security should think long and hard on how this government is entrapping immigrants instead of reforming and enforcing the law.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (right), accompanied by President Donald Trump, speaks during a news conference at the White House on Jan. 21, 2025. Trump announced an investment in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

As a part of President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, which rolled out at the end of last month, the U.S. General Services Administration launched a platform Thursday that will allow government employees to experiment with artificial intelligence tools.

USAi.gov allows federal workers to use generative AI tools, like chatbots, code builders and document summarization, for free. The platform is meant to help government employees determine which tools could be helpful to procure for their current work, and how they might customize them to their specific needs, a statement from the administration said.

The tools will come primarily from AI companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta, Fedscoop reported. OpenAI initially announced a partnership with the federal government last week, saying any federal agencies would be able to use ChatGPT Enterprise for $1 per agency for the next year.

“USAi means more than access — it’s about delivering a competitive advantage to the American people,” said GSA Deputy Administrator Stephen Ehikian, in the statement.

The GSA called the platform a “centralized environment for experimentation,” and said it will track performance and adoption strategies in a dashboard.

The platform’s creation follows Trump’s recently released plan to “accelerate AI innovation” by removing red tape around “onerous” regulations, and get AI into the hands of more workers, including federal employees.

The plan also calls for AI to be more widely adopted in manufacturing, science and in the Department of Defense, and proposes increased funding and regulatory sandboxes — separate trial spaces, like the USAi platform — for development.

A GSA official told FedScoop that before being added to the platform, AI models will be evaluated for safety, like whether a model outputs hate speech, its performance accuracy, and how it was red-teamed, or tested for durability.

But the GSA didn’t say how the introduction of USAi.gov would affect the federal government’s current tech procurement process, FedRAMP. The program, developed with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), provides a standardized way for government agencies to assess the safety and effectiveness of new tech tools.

“USAi helps the government cut costs, improve efficiency, and deliver better services to the public, while maintaining the trust and security the American people expect,” said GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive in a statement.

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin’s jobs and employment numbers showed a slightly softening economy in July, following national trends, the state labor department reported Thursday.

“The Wisconsin labor market has cooled a bit along with the national economy. Unemployment remains historically low,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the office of economic advisors for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD), in a briefing on the July numbers.

Private-sector jobs dropped slightly in July from June, DWD reported. Employment and labor force participation edged down slightly, too, as did the state’s unemployment rate.

“What we’re seeing is that Wisconsin seems to be following the national trend,” Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner. While the economy is cooling down, “we’re actually still seeing historically low unemployment rates,” Hodek said. “So you’ve got kind of a mix of up and down indicators.”

He pointed to national economic uncertainty as well as the longstanding challenge of Wisconsinites aging out of the workforce faster than younger residents are entering it as likely contributors to the economic cooling. 

DWD pegged the number of Wisconsinites working in July at 3.05 million, a drop of 4,500 from June and down 32,500 from July 2024.

The number of people who were unemployed in July was projected at 98,600 — down 2,200 from June, but up 5,400 from July 2024. The unemployment rate for July was 3.1%.

The labor force shrank in July to just under 3.15 million, a decline of 6,700 from June and a decline of 27,000 from July 2024. The labor force is defined as people 16 or older who are working or seeking work, excluding people in the military or who are in institutions such as nursing homes or prisons.

Wisconsin’s labor force participation rate was 65% of the state’s population 16 or older in July — down 0.1% from June and down just under 1% from July a year ago. Labor force participation remains ahead of the U.S. as a whole, while unemployment is lower, DWD reported.

Employment and labor force participation numbers are projected from a monthly survey of households. A separate survey, polling employers, produces data on the number of jobs in the state.

Wisconsin counted just under 3.06 million nonfarm jobs — an increase of 1,800 over June and 20,200 over July a year ago. Private sector jobs in July totaled more than 2.6 million, a decrease of 3,800 from June but still 15,100 ahead of July 2024.

Construction jobs fell by 500 from June, Hodek said, but remained 3,100 ahead of July 2024. Manufacturing jobs fell by 500, and are down 1,800 from a year ago.

Rosier picture in Wisconsin than broader U.S.

Wisconsin’s jobs report Thursday lacked the drama of the national jobs numbers reported two weeks ago that prompted President Donald Trump to fire the nation’s chief statistician.

On Friday, Aug. 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. gained 73,000 jobs in July, below analysts’ estimates. The BLS also updated national job numbers for May and June, dramatically reducing both: in June, a gain of 14,000 jobs instead of previously reported 147,000, and in May, an increase of 19,000 instead of the previously reported 125,000.

The national unemployment rate of 4.2% was in line with economic forecasts, CNBC reported. Other indicators nationally added up to “a slow but persistent cooling trend,” the North America regional president at Manpower Group, Ger Doyle, told CNBC.

Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to declare without evidence that the numbers were “RIGGED.” He summarily fired the director of the BLS, replacing her this week with an economist from the far-right Heritage Foundation who has called for a broad overhaul of the agency.

Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday that DWD has not received any communications about changes in procedure from the BLS.

“We’ve certainly seen the news and we’re monitoring the situation, of course,” Hodek said. “But we do have confidence in our data and we can’t really speculate on what could possibly happen. We’ll just need to wait and see what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does down the road.”

Hodek said that revisions of previous months’ reports are “a normal part of the data process.” The first round of data isn’t inaccurate, but “as you take more time, the data become more accurate,” he said.

“Ideally you want a combination of both —  something that kind of gives you the current edge of where you’re headed, and then as more and better data come in, you get a better sense of what has been happening,” Hodek said.

For example, a quarterly collection of information from the unemployment insurance system “actually covers most employers and it’s very solid data,” he said. “But it lags by half a year.”

Information from that report can be used to further refine the calculations and assumptions that go into the state’s monthly reports.

The monthly numbers for the nation as a whole and for each state go through different calculations and formulas, Hodek said, so it’s not possible to draw direct connections between the state jobs numbers and the national jobs numbers.

It’s also too soon to explain the seemingly dramatic differences between the national jobs picture and Wisconsin’s, he added: “We’ve only got a couple of data points where we saw those large revisions, so that doesn’t really make a trend necessarily yet.”

Hodek doesn’t think Wisconsin is somehow “diverging from the national economy,” however, he said. “In fact, it’s fairly unlikely in general, just because what happens to the national economy and the global economy is going to impact us as well. We tend to follow the national and global trends.”

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Gov. Tony Evers signs AB 257 into law Friday. The bill creates a credential and pathway for advanced practice registered nurses to practice independently. (Photo courtesy of Office of Gov. Evers)

As expected, Gov. Tony Evers signed legislation Friday that clears the way for nurses with advanced training to practice independently.

“Nurses play a critical role in our healthcare workforce, and I’m proud of our work to expand opportunities for nurses to not only grow their career but create a system that allows for more advanced practitioners here in Wisconsin,” Evers said in a statement released Friday announcing his plans to sign AB 257, the advanced practice registered nurses (APRN) legislation, now Wisconsin Act 17.

The bill creates a new license category and a professional pathway for nurses who qualify to practice independently.

Evers vetoed two other closely watched bills — one that would have carved out app-based drivers from protections under state employment laws and one that would require the state Department of Corrections to recommend sending back to prison people charged with a crime while they are on probation, parole or extended supervision.

Altogether the governor signed 16 of the 21 bills that the Legislature formally presented to him on Thursday and vetoed five.

Advanced practice nursing bill wins approval

The Wisconsin state nursing board will oversee the credentialing of advanced practice nurses, a group that includes certified nurse-midwives, certified registered nurse anesthetists, clinical nurse specialists and nurse practitioners.

Advocates said the measure will increase the availability of health care providers, particularly in parts of Wisconsin where doctors are scarce.

Evers vetoed previous versions of the bill in 2022 and 2024. Both times he expressed support for the concept but insisted nurses should meet tighter qualifications before they can practice on their own.

The bill he signed Friday adds those requirements — increasing the amount of supervision that an APRN must have under a physician to 3,840 hours before practicing independently; adding additional supervision requirements for certified registered nurse anesthetists who specialize in pain management; and including language to restrict the titles APRN practitioners use so patients aren’t confused about their credentials.

The Wisconsin Medical Society cited those issues in opposing APRN bills in previous legislative sessions, and with the 2025 revision shifted its stance to neutral.  

In floor votes in June, lawmakers from both parties stressed the bipartisan compromise reflected in the measure that was presented to Evers this week.

In his announcement, Evers thanked lawmakers for their work on the measure, including Republican state Sens. Patrick Testin and Rachael Cabral-Guevara, Republican state Rep. Tony Kurtz and Democratic state Rep. Lisa Subeck.

He also thanked “the many nursing and physician groups that we worked with to get this bipartisan bill across the finish line to help bring more folks into the healthcare profession and ensure that Wisconsinites get the high-quality care they need when they need it while setting our nurses up for success.”

Bill classifying gig drivers vetoed

Evers vetoed AB 269, legislation that would have blocked drivers from app-based rideshare and delivery businesses from being declared employees.  

The legislation would have automatically classified drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and similar businesses as independent contractors, bypassing current Wisconsin laws that differentiate independent contractors from direct employees. 

It would have categorically excluded app-based drivers from coverage under the state’s unemployment insurance, workers compensation and minimum wage laws. 

“I object to the bill’s definition of independent contractor status in the absence of any guaranteed benefit for workers,” Evers wrote in his veto message.

In a campaign pushed most prominently by DoorDash and other app-based businesses that enlist drivers, advocates focused  on the bill’s provisions that would permit — but not require — those businesses to establish portable benefits for drivers.

Evers acknowledged in his veto message that app-based drivers “are a growing segment of Wisconsin’s workforce.” But he said changing the state’s independent contractor definitions “demands substantive conversations among several parties,” with management and  workers both at the table. 

Evers wrote that while the bill was moving through the Legislature, his staff asked lawmakers and groups with an interest in the measure to allow time for “robust dialogue and engagement to reach consensus and compromise” over the legislation. 

“Unfortunately the Legislature declined to meaningfully provide that opportunity, choosing instead to send this bill to my desk anyway,” he wrote. “My veto today will allow time for these important conversations to occur so Wisconsin can find a path forward.”

The Wisconsin AFL-CIO praised the veto. “Legislation that makes the loss of important worker rights a certainty while holding out the possibility of flexible benefits if and when the employer chooses to provide them is a bad deal for workers,” President Stephanie Bloomingdale said. 

Bill pushing revocation for offenders rejected

Evers vetoed AB 85, legislation that would require the Department of Corrections to recommend automatically returning a person to prison who is charged with a crime while on extended supervision, parole or probation. Evers vetoed a similar bill in 2019.

Evers wrote in his veto message that the legislation was “an unfunded mandate” likely to cost the state more than $330 million in the first two years, according to the fiscal estimate, “and hundreds of millions in unknown, ongoing costs.” 

In addition, he wrote, it would likely require building more prison facilities and would be expected to impose new costs on local governments, while he blamed lawmakers for “significantly underfunding existing operations at the Department of Corrections in the most recent state budget.”

The bill “would move Wisconsin in the wrong direction on criminal justice reform without improving public safety,” Evers wrote. 

Instead, he urged lawmakers, “Wisconsin should be investing in data-driven, evidence-based programming that addresses barriers to reentry, enhances educational and vocational opportunities for individuals who will be released after completing their sentence, and provides treatment for mental health and substance use issues, which will help to reduce recidivism and save taxpayer money while improving public safety.”

In a message posted on Facebook the bill’s author, state Rep. Brent Jacobson (R Mosinee), criticized the veto. “It is unacceptable to give repeat criminals the opportunity to continue to put our families and neighbors at risk again and again without facing consequences,” he wrote.

The bill was opposed by criminal justice reform organizations, including the national prison reform group Dream.Org and Wisconsin-based Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO).

“This harmful bill would have led to more people being revoked from community supervision and incarcerated, making it harder to build safe and thriving communities in Wisconsin,” Dream.Org posted on Facebook. The organization credited campaigning by advocates and community groups with persuading Evers to veto the measure. 

Primary care medicine measure falls 

Evers vetoed SB 4, legislation that would specify that subscription-based direct primary medical care arrangements are not subject to the state’s insurance laws.

While the legislation had some bipartisan support in concept, it foundered at the governor’s desk on the issue of anti-discrimination language.

Evers listed in his veto message a number of provisions in the legislation that forbid primary care providers from refusing to treat patients. 

Nevertheless, he wrote that he objected to “the Legislature failing to provide sufficient protections for patients receiving care under direct primary care agreements from being discriminated against and potentially losing access to their healthcare.”

Evers did not specify what additional protections he believed the measure should include. “I previously raised similar concerns when I vetoed earlier iterations of this legislation five years ago — concerns the Legislature has declined to satisfactorily address in the bill that is now before me and despite having ample opportunity,” he wrote.

In 2020, when Evers vetoed the version of the legislation on his desk at the time, he wrote that he objected to an amendment in which lawmakers had removed language protecting patients from being refused treatment on the grounds of “genetics, national origin, gender identity, citizenship status, or whether the patient is LGBTQ.”

In his veto message Friday, Evers wrote, “Every Wisconsinite should be able to get the healthcare they need when and where they need it — and without fear of discrimination. I welcome the Legislature revisiting this legislation and the opportunity to enact a version of this bill that sufficiently addresses my concerns.”

The announcement issued by the governor’s office Friday includes a complete list of bills that the governor signed and vetoed, with links to the enacted measures and to Evers’ veto statements.

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the Von Ruden farm sits on a hill overlooking Vernon County. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

State Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Rep. Jenna Jacobson joined Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Von Ruden on his Vernon County farm Thursday to criticize the economic and agricultural policies of President Donald Trump as bad for Wisconsin’s small and medium farms. 

The event at the farm in Westby came as Wisconsin Republicans have ignored or disputed the cumulative effect on farmers of tariffs on foreign imports, cuts to programs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and an immigration policy that has scared away some farm laborers who are afraid to show up to work. 

“The tariffs coming out of Washington D.C. are hurting our farmers across Wisconsin and across the country, and you don’t have to just take this from me,” Pfaff said. “All you have to do is look at the economic indicators, those troubling signs that are coming across from Washington, D.C. Job growth is stagnating, prices are rising, and the agriculture sector is taking a hit. Sadly, my Republican colleagues in Madison seem to be turning a blind eye to all of these concerns.”

Sen. Howard Marklein (R-Spring Green), whom Jacobson is challenging in next year’s midterm elections, recently said that “farmers aren’t concerned” about the potential damage of Trump’s policies. At a telephone town hall earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany said that through actions such as raising the estate tax exemption for farms and the establishment of trade agreements with countries around the world, Wisconsin farmers will be able to benefit from “free markets.” 

But Von Ruden told the Wisconsin Examiner he doesn’t see how Wisconsin’s farmers can benefit when the federal government is cutting programs that directly help them find markets for their products while tariffs only make it harder to export. Trump and Republicans have made massive cuts to USDA programs that help schools and food banks buy food from local farmers. The recently enacted Republican reconciliation law makes large cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, which low-income residents have been able to use to buy food from producers at local farmer’s markets. 

“That’s hundreds of millions of dollars that farmers are going to lose because the government’s not going to be purchasing [food] to take care of the most needy people in this country,” Von Ruden said. “The other thing is, because we’ve allowed so many loopholes in the USDA, fewer people are getting bigger dollars from the government or insurance subsidies and things like that. So that’s taking money away from the small producers, because we don’t have the capabilities to hire an attorney to make sure that we get that $5 or $6 million check from Uncle Sam. Our members and myself, I would much rather get my income from the marketplace versus depending on a government check.”

Von Ruden’s kids are the fourth generation to work on his family farm. He said that with Trump’s tariffs, his costs are going up. Canadian fertilizer is more expensive. The John Deere tractor he uses will soon be unaffordable. 

“We need to make sure that we’re growing agriculture, not decreasing it. Looking at how tariffs are going to affect this farm, we’re going to see the trickle down effect from that in the commodity markets,” Von Ruden said. That trickle down effect is the biggest concern for farmers, he added. 

“The president has said that he’s going to make sure that farmers are taken care of,” Von Ruden said. “Tariffs aren’t going to do that. So let’s stop all the rhetoric.”

Jacobson pointed to a number of proposals in the Wisconsin Legislature meant to help farmers respond to Trump’s trade wars that Republicans have blocked. 

“Wisconsin Republicans had three chances to support our farmers, and three times they voted no,” she said. “Howard Marklein and Republicans in both chambers have failed to support our family farmers, failed to invest in our agricultural industry and made it harder for those in need to buy food. This is completely unacceptable.” 

The driftless region of western Wisconsin is set to become a major target for Democrats in next year’s midterm elections as the effects of Trump administration and Republican policies hit the purple swing region. In addition to Jacobson’s challenge of Marklein, Democrats are targeting U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s 3rd Congressional District seat.

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Some American companies have agreed to comply with new, voluntary AI standards from European Union regulators, in advance of new regulations set for 2027, but others have decried them as overreach. (Photo by Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images)

American companies are split between support and criticism of a new voluntary European AI code of practice, meant to help tech companies align themselves with upcoming regulations from the European Union’s landmark AI Act.

The voluntary code, called the General Purpose AI Code of Practice, which rolled out in July, is meant to help companies jump-start their compliance. Even non-European companies will be required to meet certain standards of transparency, safety, security and copyright compliance to operate in Europe come August 2027.  

Many tech giants have already signed the code of practice, including Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Cohere and Fastweb. But others have refused.

In July, Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a statement on Linkedin that the company would not commit.

“Europe is heading down the wrong path on AI. We have carefully reviewed the European Commission’s Code of Practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models and Meta won’t be signing it,” he wrote. “This Code introduces a number of legal uncertainties for model developers, as well as measures which go far beyond the scope of the AI Act.”

Though Google’s President of Global Affairs Kent Walker was critical of the code of practice in a company statement, Google has signed it, he said.

“We remain concerned that the AI Act and Code risk slowing Europe’s development and deployment of AI,” Walker wrote. “In particular, departures from EU copyright law, steps that slow approvals, or requirements that expose trade secrets could chill European model development and deployment, harming Europe’s competitiveness.”

The divergent approach of U.S. and European regulators has showcased a clear difference in attitude about AI protections and development between the two markets, said Vivien Peaden, a tech and privacy attorney with Baker Donelson.

She compared the approaches to cars — Americans are known for fast, powerful vehicles, while European cars are stylish and eco-friendly.

“Some people will say, I’m really worried that this engine is too powerful. You could drive the car off a cliff, and there’s not much you can do but to press the brake and stop it, so I like the European way,” Peaden said. “My response is, ‘Europeans make their car their way, right? You can actually tell the difference. Why? Because it was designed with a different mindset.”

While the United States federal government has recently enacted some AI legislation through the Take It Down Act, which prohibits AI-generated nonconsensual depictions of individuals, it has not passed any comprehensive laws on how AI may operate. The Trump administration’s recent AI Action Plan paves a clear way for AI companies to continue to grow rapidly and unregulated.

But under the EU’s AI Act, tech giants like Amazon, Google and Meta will need to be more transparent about how their models are trained and operated, and follow rules for managing systemic risks if they’d like to operate in Europe.

“Currently, it’s still voluntary,” Peaden said. “But I do believe it’s going to be one of the most influential standards in AI’s industry.”

General Purpose AI Code of Practice

The EU AI Act was passed last year to mitigate risk created by AI models, and the law creates “strict obligations” for models that are considered “high risk.” High risk AI models are those that can pose serious risks to health, safety or fundamental rights when used for employment, education, biometric identification and law enforcement, the act said.

Some AI practices, including AI-based manipulation and deception, predictions of criminal offenses, social scoring, emotion recognition in workplaces and educational institutions and real-time biometric identification for law enforcement, are considered “unacceptable risk” and are banned from use in the EU altogether.

Some of these practices, like social scoring — using an algorithm to determine access to certain privileges or opportunities like mortgages or jail time — are widely used, and often unregulated in the United States.

While AI models that will be released after Aug. 2 already have to comply with the EU AI Act’s standards, large language models (LLMs) — the technical foundation of AI models — released before that date have through August 2027 to fully comply. The code of practice released last month offers a voluntary way for companies to get into compliance early, and with more leniency than when the 2027 deadline hits, it says.

The three chapters in the code of practice are transparency, copyright and safety, and security. The copyright requirements are likely where American and European companies are highly split, said Yelena Ambartsumian, founder of tech consultancy firm Ambart Law.

In order to train LLMs, you need a broad, high-quality dataset with good grammar, Ambartsumian said. Many American LLMs turn to pirated collections of books.

“So [American companies] made a bet that, instead of paying for this content, licensing it, which would cost billions of dollars, the bet was okay, ‘we’re going to develop these LLMs, and then we’ll deal with the fallout, the lawsuits later,” Ambartsumain said. “But at that point, we’ll be in a position where, because of our war chest, or because of our revenue, we’ll be able to deal with the fallout of this fair use litigation.”

And those bets largely worked out. In two recent lawsuits, Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta, judges ruled in favor of the AI developers based on the “fair use” doctrine, which allows people to use copyrighted material without permission in certain journalistic or creative contexts. In AI developer Anthropic’s case, Judge William Alsup likened the training process to how a human might read, process, and later draw on a book’s themes to create new content.

But the EU’s copyright policy bans developers from training AI on pirated content and says companies must also comply with content owners’ requests to not use their works in their datasets. It also outlines rules about transparency with web crawlers, or how AI models rake through the internet for information. AI companies will also have to routinely update documentation about their AI tools and services for privacy and security.

Those subject to the requirements of the EU’s AI Act are general purpose AI models, nearly all of which are large American corporations, Ambartsumain said. Even if a smaller AI model comes along, it’s often quickly purchased by one of the tech giants, or they develop their own versions of the tool.

“I would also say that in the last year and a half, we’ve seen a big shift where no one right now is trying to develop a large language model that isn’t one of these large companies,” Ambartsumain said.

Regulations could bring markets together

There’s a “chasm” between the huge American tech companies and European startups, said Jeff Le, founder and managing partner of tech policy consultancy 100 Mile Strategies LLC. There’s a sense that Europe is trying to catch up with the Americans who have had unencumbered freedom to grow their models for years.

But Le said he thinks it’s interesting that Meta has categorized the code of practice as overreach.

“I think it’s an interesting comment at a time where Europeans understandably have privacy and data stewardship questions,” Le said. “And that’s not just in Europe. It’s in the United States too, where I think Gallup polls and other polls have revealed bipartisan support for consumer protection.”

As the code of practice says, signing now will reduce companies’ administrative burden when the AI Act goes into full enforcement in August 2027. Le said that relationships between companies that sign could garner them more understanding and familiarity when the regulatory burdens are in place.

But some may feel the transparency or copyright requirements could cost them a competitive edge, he said.

“I can see why Meta, which would be an open model, they’re really worried about (the copyright) because this is a big part of their strategy and catching up with OpenAI and (Anthropic),” Le said. “So there’s that natural tension that will come from that, and I think that’s something worth noting.”

Le said that the large AI companies are likely trying to anchor themselves toward a framework that they think they can work with, and maybe even influence. Right now, the U.S. is a patchwork of AI legislation. Some of the protections outlined in the EU AI Act are mirrored in state laws, but there’s no universal code for global companies.

The EU’s code of practice could end up being that standard-setter, Peaden said.

“Even though it’s not mandatory, guess what? People will start following,” she said. “Frankly, I would say the future of building the best model lies in a few other players. And I do think that … if four out of five of the primary AI providers are following the general purpose AI code of practice, the others will follow.”

Editor’s note: This item has been modified to revise comments from Jeff Le.

Workers install solar panels on the roof of a low-income household in California. On Thursday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers wrote a letter to the EPA urging the Trump administration not to cancel the Solar for All program. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Gov. Tony Evers wrote to the federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, urging the Trump administration not to cancel Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant to install solar energy systems for low- and moderate-income households.

Evers’ letter to EPA administrator Lee Zeldin followed a New York Times report earlier this week that the agency was preparing to cancel the $7 billion federal “Solar for All” grant program. “Solar for All” was part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act passed by congressional Democrats and signed by then-president Joe Biden.

“To be clear, attempting to terminate Solar for All grants has no legitimate purpose or justification,” Evers wrote. “Beyond that, doing so will also negatively impact Wisconsinites and our state, causing increased energy bills for Wisconsinites and hurting efforts to improve air quality, boost resilience, and create good-paying jobs.”

The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. has put out a request for proposal seeking an implementer for the state’s program, called “PowerUp Wisconsin.” Bidders were to submit a notice of their intent to bid by this past Monday, Aug. 4, and final proposals are due on Friday, Aug. 29.

According to the WEDC’s work plan for the project, Wisconsin’s grant would add rooftop solar power systems to 1,038 households in single-family homes and 2,200 more households in 24 multifamily homes. The plan also calls for 10 community solar projects that could serve an additional 4,239 households.

Evers told Zeldin in the letter that since Wisconsin’s $62.4 million grant was awarded in April 2024, the WEDC has worked with local governments, solar installers, utilities and housing developers to draw up the state’s program guidelines. The program would reduce Wisconsin’s reliance on out-of-state energy and save households up to $500 a year on their energy bills, Evers wrote.

The governor wrote that lowering costs has been “a top priority” for his administration.

“While the Trump Administration claims to share this priority, terminating Wisconsin’s Solar for All grant would have the exact opposite effect, preventing Wisconsin families and households from seeing the direct savings offered through PowerUp Wisconsin,” Evers wrote.

The Evers administration and the Wisconsin Department of Justice have joined a number of lawsuits to block Trump administration executive orders and unilateral actions to cut funding approved by Congress.

Evers’ letter appeared to leave open the prospect for more litigation. “At a time when energy demand continues to increase, it is unfathomable for the Trump Administration to unnecessarily — and potentially illegally — terminate funding for a program designed to deploy affordable, renewable energy systems,” Evers wrote.

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The building that houses video game company Raven Software is shown in Middleton, Wis. A group of quality assurance testers at the company have ratified their first union contract — more than three years after launching the first union at a major U.S. gaming studio. (Photo by M.P. King/Wisconsin State Journal)

Video game testers at Middleton-based Raven Software have ratified their first union contract, more than three years after making local and national headlines by launching the first union at a major U.S. studio.

Ratified on Aug. 4, the contract gives employees a 10% raise while limiting mandatory overtime and preserving remote work options.

The deal is the latest development in a saga involving some of the video game industry’s lowest-paid workers. It comes after Microsoft purchased Activision Blizzard, Raven Software’s parent company, leaving the roughly two dozen testers to negotiate with one of the world’s largest tech companies.

“I think we pretty much got everything we aimed for,” said Erin Hall, a seven-year veteran at Raven and one of two workers who negotiated the contract. As a quality assurance tester, she checks for bugs in the blockbuster Call of Duty franchise and works with developers to fix them.

An Activision Blizzard spokesperson declined to comment but directed Wisconsin Watch to a web page discussing Microsoft’s labor principles.

Studios nationwide employ testers to play new video games and identify problems before release.

Raven’s testers make around $21 an hour, and they’re frequently required to work overtime in weeks-long “crunch time” stretches ahead of a game’s release. The volatile nature of their industry prompted the workers to organize.

The testers walked off the job to protest layoffs of a dozen colleagues in December 2021. They announced the formation of a union the next month — the first at a AAA studio that makes high-budget games. The Game Workers Alliance represents the workers, organized with support from Communications Workers of America.

Lessons from three years of negotiating

For Hall and fellow bargaining committee member Autumn Prazuch, contract negotiations required intensive lessons on bargaining and labor laws. Neither had joined a union before launching their own.

“We had no idea it would be this difficult, or that it would take three-and-a-half years, or that it’d be this stressful, that we would be giving up so many nights and weekends,” Hall said. “We felt like it was the right thing to do, and we did it, and we learned as we went.”

The process took about twice as long as a norm that has grown longer in recent years. Newly unionized workers between 2020 to 2023 spent an average of 17 months negotiating their first contract, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis.

The contract negotiations overlapped with a change of ownership: Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to buy Activision Blizzard. In 2022, while waiting for regulators to approve the deal, Microsoft committed to remaining neutral on the workers’ unionization efforts.

That was after Activision took steps organizers called union busting, including withholding raises granted to nonunion workers and reorganizing Raven’s staff in what the union argued was an attempt to dilute its support ahead of the election.

Prazuch said negotiating with leaders at Activision and Microsoft made her feel like “a little fish in a big pond.”

“You’re sitting across from tech billionaires, and this is a huge company … and we’re 19 people at Raven QA in Middleton, Wisconsin,” she said.

But in that process, Prazuch discovered strengths she didn’t know she had.

“I’ve learned that I have more determination than I initially thought, that my voice is louder than I thought it was,” Prazuch said.

She also learned that the same focus that helps her identify glitches in games allowed her to flag subtle wording changes that would shift the terms of the deal.

The deal they reached limits mandatory overtime to half the weeks in a quarter, and it gives testers the flexibility to choose their schedules when working overtime. Workers who currently work remotely can continue to do so under a contract that also promises 10% raises over the two-year contract period, with potential for additional raises.

Hall said she’d encourage other workers to start unions — if they’re in it for the long haul.

“I would not want to take it back for anything, but it was really hard work,” Hall said. “If people want to unionize at their workplace, just know it’s going to be really difficult, and you have to be committed to seeing it through to the end.”

More video game workers are unionizing

While Microsoft’s promise to not oppose employees’ union efforts contrasts with many other major companies, the process has still had moments of controversy. Communications Workers of America, for instance, criticized Microsoft this summer when it announced plans to lay off around 9,000 workers across the company. That included its gaming division, where it halted production of several games.

Raven’s quality assurance team escaped those layoffs, along with a previous round, Hall said. Having a contract doesn’t guarantee the testers won’t be laid off, but it requires the company to offer notice and bargain over severance and benefits.

Keith Fuller, a former Raven Software employee who is now a Madison-based workplace culture consultant, called collective bargaining “one of the few levers that game developers have” as video game companies tighten their belts and as the Trump administration redefines workers’ rights.

“The power imbalance that’s inherent in capitalism shows up very easily in game development,” Fuller said. “I think that this is something that will benefit workers across the industry.”

The organizing trend comes as state lawmakers are exploring ways to encourage video game companies to move to Wisconsin or expand their in-state operations.

In the years since Raven workers unionized, workers at some other major studios have followed their lead. Communications Workers of America says it now represents 2,000 video game workers at Microsoft.

“When we started [our union campaign], we were kind of ambitiously hoping that there’d be anyone that would do this too, and now there’s so many,” Hall said.

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To republish, go to the original story and follow the Wisconsin Watch republication guidelines. 

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Photo by Architect of the Capitol | U.S. government work via Flickr

The July jobs report released last Friday wasn’t pretty. It showed weaker than anticipated U.S. job growth in July, and there were substantial downward revisions of jobs numbers for May and June as well. Economists predicted a slowdown. The chaos of tariff threats has created substantial uncertainty, which is bad for the economy, and the tariffs that have gone into effect have raised prices. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re seeing a slowdown in jobs. 

Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted on social media, “It’s no mystery why the economy is struggling; blame increasing U.S. tariffs and highly restrictive immigration policy. The tariffs are cutting increasingly deeply into the profits of American companies and the purchasing power of American households. Fewer immigrant workers means a smaller economy.”

But instead of reflecting on mistakes in economic policy or offering some austerity suggestion, like limiting U.S.  children to  two dolls each , President Donald Trump blamed the messenger, firing the government official in charge of the data release, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Erika McEntarfer. He baselessly asserted that the bad news was “concocted” and suggested that he knows better than the data. The economy is great, according to him, and he will find a commissioner to tell him so.

Trump’s approach is a disaster for economic decision making and for public trust. The BLS is an independent agency with a strong legacy of providing the data that businesses, analysts and policymakers need. Good economic decisions require reliable data. As the American Economics Association wrote: “The BLS has long had a well-deserved reputation for professional excellence and nonpartisan integrity. Safeguarding this tradition is vital for the continued health of the U.S. economy and public trust in our institutions.” 

The BLS monthly jobs report provides a timely snapshot of labor market dynamics which inform investing and hiring decisions as well as policy choices. BLS data also measures the rate of inflation through the consumer price index. The rising price of goods is not only a key economic indicator but also the scale by which Social Security payments are adjusted and a point of reference in private and union wage negotiations.

BLS data are essential to understanding what is going on in the economy, when a slowdown is emerging, and the cost of daily life. The independence and integrity of the agency, long assumed and supported by both parties, is now under attack.

Wisconsinites lived through something like this more than a decade ago. Former Republican Gov. Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs in his first term. He focused on the goal relentlessly, at least until it became clear that he would not meet it. (In fact, the Wisconsin economy didn’t even meet Walker’s first term goal across his two terms – adding just 233,000 jobs by the time he left office after serving for eight years.)

In the first years of Walker’s  “relentless focus on jobs” under his administration’s tagline  “Wisconsin is Open for Business,” the monthly numbers showed that Wisconsin’s economy was growing more slowly than the national labor market and neighboring states. 

Walker blamed the data. He insisted that we wait instead for a federal source which was more reliable, but had a substantial time lag. As someone who watches this data, I can assure that this was the only time in my three-decade career when differences between monthly and quarterly sources of federal jobs data were a policy talking point. 

But in the end, the data issue was just a distraction from the truth. Wisconsin was growing more slowly, and no amount of complaining about the data or waiting for another source on jobs could change that fact. Eventually, the Walker administration went silent on both the data and the promised 250,000 jobs. 

Trump’s approach is worse than waiting for another source of data. His firing of the commissioner suggests that he’ll only accept data that confirms his narrative. And that makes it harder for any of us to trust any data the federal government is willing to release. 

That’s bad for the economy and bad for democracy. As narrow and nerdy as this topic may seem, we all have an interest in facts and reliable data. We have had a government infrastructure capable of producing it. We lose it at our own peril.

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A container ship arrives at the Port of Oakland on Aug. 1, 2025 in Oakland, California. President Donald Trump announced that his Aug. 1 deadline for trade deals will not be extended and sweeping tariffs will be imposed on certain countries beginning that day. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pushed ahead with his promise to raise tariffs on foreign goods by Aug. 1, signing an order late Thursday increasing import taxes on products from nearly every U.S. trading partner.

Trump’s directive, and new data on weaker job growth, sent markets tumbling Friday.

The president imposed a 15% base tariff on products imported from nearly three dozen nations across five continents, plus the 27 trading nations that comprise the European Union. Trump slapped higher rates on select other countries, ranging from 18% on goods from Nicaragua to 30% on South Africa and 50% on Brazil.

The White House hailed the “reciprocal” tariffs as “a necessary and powerful tool to put America First after many years of unsustainable trade deficits that threaten our economy and national security,” according to a press release accompanying the executive order.

Trump describes the tariffs as “reciprocal” because they are his response to countries that have trade deficits with the U.S. — meaning that country sells more products to the U.S. than it buys.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called the new rates “historic.”

“Over the past few months, the President’s tariff program and the ensuing ‘Trump Round’ of trade negotiations have accomplished what the World Trade Organization and multilateral negotiations have not been able to achieve at scale: expansive new market access for U.S. exporters, increased tariffs to defend critical American industries, and trillions of new manufacturing investments and purchases of goods that will create great American jobs and help reassert American leadership in key strategic sectors,” Greer said in a statement Wednesday.

The tariff announcement, combined with a weaker-than-expected jobs report Friday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, caused sell-offs Friday from the three major U.S. stock indexes, according to financial media reports.

Trump fumed Friday afternoon about report adjustments that significantly decreased jobs numbers for May and June, even calling for the commissioner for labor statistics to be fired.

Tariffs and lawsuits

Trump made history earlier this year when he became the first president to trigger tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

The move sparked legal challenges from small businesses and Democratic-led states, and the plaintiffs faced the Trump administration Thursday in federal appeals court.

Tariffs are taxes on imported products that U.S. companies and other buyers pay to the U.S. government.

Trump announced staggering tariffs under an emergency declaration on April 2, what he referred to as “Liberation Day,” but delayed the new import taxes after global markets plummeted in response to the shock announcement.

Trump also separately announced Thursday a 35% levy on imported products from Canada that fall outside the bounds of an already established trade agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Trump continued a 25% tariff on certain Mexican goods, but paused any rate increases to allow for 90 days of negotiations, according to media reports. The U.S. is continuing negotiations with China, whose products face a base import tax rate of 30%.

Marc Noland, executive vice president and director of studies for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said Trump’s latest tariff rates are “unfortunate.”

“It will contribute to higher prices and slower growth here in the United States,” Noland said, adding there’s “a question about how sustainable they are legally here in the U.S.”

“And it’s particularly unfortunate, because I’m looking at the entire list of countries and see that the countries with the highest rates are the countries that are in the worst shape — Laos gets 40%, Syria got 41%,  Myanmar gets 40%. It’s the poorest, most desperate countries that are getting hit with the highest tariffs. So it’s bad for us and it’s bad for the world,” Noland told States Newsroom in an interview Friday.

The 15% rate on imports from dozens of countries mirrors the deals Trump announced in recent weeks with Japan, South Korea and European Union — though many details remain unknown.

“There are real questions about what exactly did anybody agree to,” Noland said. “And you know this, these don’t have the force of law that a treaty negotiated and passed by our Congress and somebody else’s national legislature have like, say, the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which, as we see, was unilaterally abrogated.”

‘Predictable’ trade agenda urged

Trade and industry advocates have also reacted to the new tariffs.

Gary Shapiro, CEO and vice chair of the Consumer Technology Association, issued a statement Thursday saying Trump’s new rates “highlight the uncertainty American innovators face in today’s trade environment.”

“CTA continues to urge the Administration and Congress to pursue a predictable, forward-looking trade agenda rooted in fairness and collaboration with trusted partners,” said Shapiro, whose organization hosts the annual CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada. “American innovation thrives when markets are open, trade rules are clear, and businesses are free to focus on creating jobs and bringing groundbreaking technologies to market.”

The National Foreign Trade Council warned that “Whatever progress that’s ultimately achieved as part of these new trade deals will come at the steep price of significant U.S. tariff increases and the erosion of trust with America’s key partners.”

The statement Thursday from the industry group’s president, Jake Colvin, continued: “Institutionalizing the highest U.S. duties since the Great Depression, coupled with ongoing uncertainty, will ultimately make American businesses less competitive globally and consumers worse off while harming relationships with close geopolitical allies and trading partners.”