A federal official has affirmed the pro-union vote at a West Allis mental health clinic, rejecting challenges to the outcome lodged by Rogers Behavioral Health.

The decision, issued Oct. 15 by National Labor Relations Board regional director Jennifer Hadsall, certifies the National Union of Healthcare Workers as the official representative for employees at the Rogers West Allis clinic.

Hadsall also rejected a series of challenges that Rogers management made in connection with the election, held April 22, when employees voted 53-4 for union representation.

The union was previously certified to represent employees at Rogers’ Madison clinic, where employees voted 26-4 in favor of the union, also on April 22.

Rogers Behavioral Health, based in Oconomowoc, operates a network of mental health hospitals, residential treatment clinics and outpatient clinics in 10 states. Employees at three clinics in California and one in Pennsylvania organized with the National Union of Healthcare Workers starting a few years ago.

In a statement issued Monday, Rogers acknowledged the union had been certified at both Wisconsin locations but declined to respond to questions about the organization’s next steps, including whether it would begin bargaining with the union.

The organization’s statement said Rogers was “unable to comment further on pending legal proceedings related to these certifications.”

A certification order can be appealed to the full National Labor Relations Board in Washington, D.C. Rogers declined to answer directly when asked if the organization’s management was appealing the certification decisions to the board.

The West Allis certification order rejected a series of objections to the election outcome, including claims that three fired employees trespassed on the day of the vote. An administrative law judge upheld the right of the fired employees to vote and found no evidence of trespass, and the new order upheld those findings.

The certification order follows a finding, also issued by Hadsall, a week earlier that Rogers violated federal labor laws before, during and after the election, including by firing six employees involved in the union organizing campaign. A hearing on the NLRB complaint is scheduled for December.

The sheer size of investment in data centers is drawing concern as it surpasses all other historical booms and crowds out other more job-creating ventures. 

Until now, no industry had driven the U.S. economy with such force since the railroad expansion of the late 1800s, when titans battled one another to lay the transcontinental tracks that would connect America from coast to coast.

Railroads in the 19th century consumed about $173 billion in today’s dollars and created more than 2% of the nation’s annual economic output (GDP) over 20 years. 

Today’s data center buildout will dwarf that amount, with $10 trillion in investment, and now have almost twice the economic impact — nearly 4% of GDP. That’s according to a report created by a Columbia Business School professor, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

States are starting to feel left out of the windfall, many having granted tax exemptions before the boom. 

Years ago, before artificial intelligence prompted a tsunami of building, states typically welcomed data centers supporting internet traffic, offering tax abatements and other perks. Many officials now are rethinking that approach as tax revenues take a bigger hit and high energy demands take a toll on affordability. 

Nevada, for instance, trimmed tax abatements and will ask data centers to agree to foot the bill for energy and water demands, in a September executive order from Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo. 

States where data center costs will be concentrated over the three years are Texas ($638 billion), Virginia ($249 billion), Ohio ($169 billion) and Georgia ($160 billion), according to projections from Industrial Info Resources, a market intelligence firm.   

Southern states dominate the landscape for the number of data centers planned, with large numbers also proposed in Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington state, according to a Pew Research Center report in April. 

The profitability of AI has yet to catch up with the expense of the buildout.

“It is not a pretty picture right now,” said IIR’s senior vice president of research, David Pickering. “I think it will become profitable once things settle down a bit and more legislation is put in place to regulate how we handle AI. 

“The big players will no doubt find a way to make it profitable,” he said.  

There are signs the staggering cost of data centers is crowding out other investments such as housing. 

Over the past two years new construction value for data centers has more than doubled to $85 billion annually, while all other construction value has dropped 8%, according to a Stateline analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data as of August.

As new data center value grew by $48 billion since 2024, new houses and apartments dropped by $29 billion, according to the data.

Adam Shapiro, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, noted the change in a September social media post: “We’re seeing a pivotal shift in the US economy: investment is shifting away from residential investment and towards computers.” 

Some, like the economist Paul Krugman, see the shift as hurting employment in the long run, despite more current hiring for construction workers. 

“Because data centers employ so few workers, the vast spending on AI currently taking place will also significantly reduce the demand for labor,” Krugman wrote in an Oct. 11 analysis.

Josh Bivens, chief economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, agreed that the economy’s recent dependence on data centers and other AI spending is unhealthy, calling it “a narrow base of growth, basically one sector, and a pretty fragile one.” 

“Anything that upsets expectations about the future potential profitability of AI investments will likely lead to pretty sharp cutbacks,” Bivens said. “I’m uneasy about how durable this strength might turn out to be.”

As for the historic nature of the buildout, Mark Higgins, author of a book on U.S. financial history, said there are parallels to the age of railroad building in the late 19th century.  

“Railroads were a huge investment,” Higgins said. “In the 1800’s most of the capital was foreign, and it would attract all this money from Europe, then everything would crash — there were several panics —and Americans would buy the distressed railroads and profit, because they knew which were the good ones.” 

Railroad construction, which did not include trains themselves, cost $4.3 billion between 1870 and 1890, about $173 billion in today’s dollars, according to historical figures provided to Stateline by Van Nieuwerburgh and adjusted for inflation.

Other large-scale construction booms consumed only about 1% or less of annual GDP: Canals in the early 19th century, electrification in the early 20th century, highways in the mid- to late-20th century, and telecoms and fiber between 1996 and 2003.

In a report this month the International Monetary Fund warned of the risk of lower stock prices if high expectations for AI fail to materialize. 

“Although core firms in the AI ecosystem have been profitable so far … weaker or less durable investment and profitability in AI could trigger a correction,” the report warned.

The buildout will also double electricity consumption, Van Nieuwerburgh estimated, a continual thorn for data center projects that need more power to process vast data troves to power AI applications. 

An Oregon report last month, which led to a continued freeze on data center approvals in the state, said the single most frequent concern in public comments is utility affordability.

An analysis from two universities in July found that the combination of data centers and cryptocurrency mining could raise electricity bills by 8% nationally, and as much as 25% in parts of Virginia. The report came from a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and North Carolina State University. 

Virginia passed an electricity consumption surcharge specifically for data centers that began in July, in a budget compromise that preserved lucrative tax breaks for the data centers. Some localities with heavy concentrations are considering pauses, and at least one city has a moratorium.

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

Rogers Behavioral Health violated federal labor laws when it fired six employees amid a contentious union organizing campaign in Wisconsin, according to a National Labor Relations Board official in a new complaint against the healthcare provider.

Rogers officials also violated labor laws when they accused the employees of criminal conduct and threatened them with criminal charges, civil charges, litigation and professional misconduct complaints, the NLRB complaint charges.

Those actions took place starting two months before employees at Rogers’ clinic in West Allis voted to be represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, and continued on the day the vote was held and in the weeks that followed, according to the complaint.

Rogers executives fired the employees because they “supported and assisted the Union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities,” the complaint states.

The complaint, issued Oct. 8 by Minneapolis-based NLRB regional director Jennifer Hadsall, set a hearing on the allegations to start Dec. 14 before a labor relations board administrative law judge in Milwaukee.

In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon on behalf of Rogers by a staff communications, marketing and public relations specialist, the organization declined to comment on the allegations or “pending proceedings” because the case is “an active legal matter.”

The statement asserted that Rogers respects “all employees’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act” and conducted “all employment and labor practices” according to “applicable law and longstanding policies.”

Rogers Behavioral Health, based in Oconomowoc, operates a network of mental health hospitals, residential treatment clinics and outpatient clinics in 10 states.

Employees at three clinics in California and one in Pennsylvania organized with the National Union of Healthcare Workers starting a few years ago.

Spurred by policy changes that employees said led to increased client caseloads and reduced one-on-one care for clients, therapists and other behavioral health professionals at clinics in Madison and West Allis began organizing with the NUHW in 2025.

After a contentious organizing campaign that was met with strong opposition by Rogers management, on April 22 West Allis employees voted 53-4 and Madison employees voted 26-4 in favor of the union.

Rogers has declined to recognize the union at either clinic and has mounted an appeal to overturn the West Allis vote.

First firings after union drive goes public

Rogers fired three West Allis employees who were union supporters in February, shortly after they went public with a petition for union recognition.

According to the NLRB complaint, a Rogers manager directed the fired employees “not to discuss their terminations.”

At the same time, Rogers’ President and CEO, Cindy Meyer, directed employees in writing “to keep their terms and conditions of employment confidential,” the complaint states.

With those instructions as well as some broad Rogers policies directing employees to keep information confidential, Rogers officials were “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights” guaranteed under the National Labor Relations Act, the complaint states. The confidentiality policies, quoted in the complaint, are not limited to information about individual patients.

The union filed charges with the NLRB on behalf of the three employees fired in February. The charges enabled them to vote in the West Allis union representation election on April 22.

When they showed up at the clinic to vote, a fourth employee escorted them to the polling area where they cast their ballots, which were set aside as challenged under standard NLRB procedures. The employee then escorted them out of the clinic.  

According to the complaint, Rogers suspended that employee the day of the vote and fired her five days later because she “assisted employees participating in the NLRB-conducted election” — and because she “supported and assisted the Union and engaged in concerted activities, and to discourage employees from engaging in these activities.”

That violated federal labor law by “discriminating against employees for their participation in a Board-conducted election,” the complaint states.

Matt Artz, a spokesperson for the NUHW, said Rogers tried to challenge her application for unemployment insurance but that the challenge was rejected.

Two other employees were also suspended on the day of the vote and fired five days later, the complaint charges — also because they supported the union and to discourage other employees.

Complaint charges attorney’s letter ‘coerced employees’

In the six firings, Rogers was “discriminating in regard to the hire or tenure or terms or conditions of employment of its employees, thereby discouraging membership in a labor organization” — also a labor law violation, according to the complaint.

The NLRB complaint also charges that an attorney representing Rogers wrote a memo to employees that “coerced employees” exercising their rights under federal labor law “by repeatedly characterizing protected employee activity as criminal activity, in violation of civil laws, and as professional misconduct; and threatened employees with criminal charges, civil charges, litigation, and misconduct complaints with their respective professional organizations for having engaged in protected activity.”

A Rogers vice president, Steven Hertig, sent a complaint against one of the fired employees, Kate Zolandz, to the state Department of Safety and Professional Services, which oversees professional licensing

The NLRB complaint doesn’t mention the license challenge, but the NUHW said in a press release Tuesday that in the filing with DSPS, the Rogers executive claimed that when Zolandz donned a cape during her lunch break on the day of the vote, “a patient became dysregulated.”

After reviewing the complaint, however, DSPS officials wrote back to an attorney representing Zolandz that the information in the licensing challenge “does not indicate a violation” of relevant state administrative codes or laws.

“We took a stand to improve care for our patients, and Rogers executives tried to ruin our careers,” said Zolandz in a NUHW press release Tuesday. “Rogers acted like it could do anything to us it wanted, so it’s great to see that the federal government is holding Rogers accountable to the law.”

The photograph with this report has been updated to correct its source.

Household water bills are increasing faster than inflation and income, according to a new analysis.

The environmental advocacy nonprofit Food and Water Watch analyzed water bill data among the nation’s 500 largest community water providers. Those systems serve a collective 155 million people — nearly half the nation’s population.

Between 2015 and 2025, water bills increased by 62% on average across those water providers. That was faster than the overall inflation rate and more than two times the rate of grocery price increases over the same period. Food and Water Watch found that water bills increased 19% faster than household incomes, meaning people are spending a greater share of their earnings on water.

In Louisiana, Maryland, New Hampshire and West Virginia, water bills grew about twice as fast as household incomes, the analysis found.

Costs varied widely across the country: In Idaho, the average household spent $286 on water bills last year. In West Virginia, the average cost was $1,383. The analysis found for-profit water companies charge more than publicly owned water providers (Food and Water Watch advocates against private ownership of water systems).

The analysis projects that costs will rise further as climate-change driven drought and natural disasters threaten water supplies. It also pointed to growing infrastructure needs that are estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars across the country.

“Industrial pollution, aging infrastructure, and federal disinvestment are fueling a crisis for the nation’s water systems,” the report said.

The American Water Works Association, which includes more than 4,300 North American water utilities, estimates American drinking water systems will need as much as $2.4 trillion over the next 25 years to sustain and modernize infrastructure. If those costs are covered solely by users, bills could more than double by 2050, the association projected.

Aside from abandoning water system privatization, Food and Water Watch recommends that state and local governments support local control of water systems, hold polluters accountable for contamination and prevent the tech, fossil fuel and agriculture sectors from passing on costs to residential water users. The organization also calls on Congress to fund water improvement projects that can help communities meet federal water standards.

The report comes as more Americans struggle with the high costs of electricity, gas, groceries and housing.

Electric bills continued to soar and millions of families that heat their homes with oil are facing a much more expensive winter. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state employees administering federal energy assistance programs, estimates that heating oil costs will be about 50% higher than last winter.

Though federal forecasters predict a warmer winter, wars in Iran and Ukraine have greatly disrupted petroleum markets, leading to quick price hikes.

Households in the Northeast, which use more than 80% of the nation’s heating oil, will be most affected. But the association projects American home heating costs will rise an average of 8.7% this winter — more than twice the rate of inflation.

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

Wisconsin and 13 other states have sued the Trump administration for canceling $45 million in federal grants to modernize their unemployment insurance systems after the COVID-19 pandemic strained state jobless pay programs.

The grants were awarded from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act enacted in the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. Five months after President Donald Trump took office, the U.S. Labor Department canceled the grants in May 2025, according to the lawsuit filed late Thursday in the federal Court of Claims.

“Wisconsin’s working to bring state government into the 21st Century, including modernizing our systems to help streamline services and prevent fraud, and right now, President Trump and his administration are blocking us from continuing to do that important work. That’s unacceptable,” said Gov. Tony Evers in a press release Friday announcing the lawsuit.

Wisconsin and Maryland are the lead plaintiffs in the multi-state lawsuit, joined by California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

The U.S. Department of Labor did not respond immediately Friday to a request for comment on the lawsuit. 

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, as business shutdowns spiked unemployment claims in Wisconsin, the unemployment insurance system hit major snags that led to widespread complaints. Similar problems surfaced across the country.

The Evers administration blamed the state computer system used for processing claims, and in 2021 lawmakers authorized a major overhaul of the system.

The federal law originally provided $2 billion for states to invest in improvements to their unemployment insurance systems for “fraud prevention, equitable access, and timely payment to eligible workers,” in the words of the legislation. A 2023 federal law, while Biden was still president, reduced the program to $1 billion, including $500 million that had not yet been obligated.

Grants to the states included funding to modernize state unemployment insurance computer systems; grants to address program integrity, including improved verification for applicants, reducing improper payments, recovering overpayments and preventing fraud; grants to help jobless pay applicants better navigate the application process and reduce obstacles for accessing benefits; grants focused on improved equity in programs, such as a Wisconsin website to combat the misclassification of workers; and other fraud prevention grants.

On May 22, 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor terminated all the grants in “boilerplate letters” stating that “each grant agreement was ‘being terminated because it no longer effectuates [the Labor Department’s] priorities for its grant funding,’” according to the lawsuit.

The terminations canceled more than $45 million in funds that the 14 states had been counting on, including $29 million that Wisconsin had been promised, Evers’ office said.  

Evers wrote several times in 2025 and again in early 2026 to the Trump administration protesting the cancelation of Wisconsin’s grants and urging their restoration.

According to Evers’ office, the lost funds interrupted Wisconsin’s projects for a web-based employer portal equipped with secure communications to reduce improper payments and fraud; additional fraud detection and prevention tools; communication improvements with employers and unemployment insurance applicants; and identity authentication and other application modernization projects.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, “we made modernizing our unemployment system a top priority, and while we’ve seen tremendous results, our work is not done,” Evers said Friday in his announcement.

“Projects of this scale require careful planning, and the Trump Administration’s sudden decision to terminate this funding is halting progress on work that’s been years in the making,” Evers said. “The Trump Administration’s decision to obstruct millions of dollars that Wisconsin was promised to continue our efforts defies logic. If the Trump Administration is serious about fighting fraud, they wouldn’t be withholding critical resources that should be helping states like Wisconsin do just that.”

Department of Workforce Development Secretary-designee Amy Pechacek said the work underway at the agency aimed to improve customer service as well as combat fraud.

“Terminating funding for this project pulled the rug out from us and required us to cancel our vendor contract before the final product could be delivered, resulting in a serious setback for Wisconsin,” Pechacek said.

The lawsuit charges that the Labor Department’s “unilateral terminations breached the express terms of Plaintiffs’ Grant Agreements, which allowed for termination only in narrow, specified circumstances.”

The lawsuit declares that the grant agreements never stated that they could be terminated “due to changes in agency priorities that occurred after the grants were executed” — and federal law would not have allowed for that possibility, the suit states.

“By unilaterally cancelling the Grant Agreements without any lawful justification, DOL breached the express terms of the Grant Agreements and violated the covenant of good faith and fair dealing,” the lawsuit states.

The union representing nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison and Dean Medical Group outpatient clinics in Dane County has escalated charges that the two healthcare providers are violating federal labor laws after employees voted overwhelmingly for union representation.

SEIU Wisconsin filed unfair labor practice charges this week with the National Labor Relations Board against St. Mary’s and against Dean. Both organizations are part of SSM Health, a Catholic nonprofit health system based in St. Louis.

A 71% majority of nurses at Dean’s 10 clinics voted for union representation in September, three months after nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital voted for union representation with an 89% majority in June. Altogether the two groups of nurses total nearly 1,200 people.

To date, SSM has declined to bargain with the hospital nurses’ union, citing pending challenges to the June election. Earlier in September the union charged the hospital management with failing to bargain in violation of federal law.

The newest charge against the hospital alleges a nurse was fired in August in retaliation for supporting the union.

The new charges against Dean allege that the medical group discriminated against union supporters in prohibiting union-related materials from work areas and barring employees from displaying union insignia and other items supporting the union; engaged in surveillance of employees; held captive audience meetings with threats of discipline or firing for people who didn’t attend; and threatened employees with “negative changes to terms and conditions of employment” if employees voted in the union.

Those charges follow previous charges filed with the NLRB, including one against Dean in September for firing a nurse and a string of charges against St. Mary’s earlier in September, including the failure-to-bargain allegation.

“We are doing this so we can have a voice,” said Dean nurse Michelle Camilleri in a phone interview Thursday. “My colleagues and I want to provide a certain standard of care for our patients. We want to be able to care for them in a way so they can get the highest level of care as we can give.”

She said nurses who voted for unionization were responding to policies and practices that were making it “difficult to provide that standard of care” for patients and have driven some nurses to leave SSM.

“We would like to see SSM come to the table,” Camilleri said.

In a statement Thursday, SSM denied violating federal labor laws. “There has been no unlawful conduct. We respect and value all of our employees,” the statement said.

The statement called the allegations “another ongoing attempt to distract us” from the health system’s mission.

Jobs across the United States rose by 29,000 in September, a disappointing result as recent growth was also revised down in Friday’s monthly jobs report, the last one before midterm elections. 

September growth was a large dip from a strong August number that was revised down from 162,000 to 133,000 in the new report. July jobs were also revised from an increase of 21,000 to a decrease of 10,000, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly report. 

“This is a textbook weak jobs report,” economist Kathryn Anne Edwards said on a live chat on Substack after the release.

The fact that earnings, up 3%, are not keeping up with 3.4% inflation, means “We can say pretty categorically that things got worse for workers this month,” Edwards said.

Average hourly earnings increased slightly to $37.81, up 3% from a year ago. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1% in August, but still a decrease from 4.4% in September 2025. 

Speaking on Fox News, Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, tried to frame the joblessness increase as a result of a labor market that more potential workers have returned to since August. 

“People are seeing the strong labor market and they’re saying, ‘Oh I need to get back in the labor force because I’m going to make so much money.’ That’s one reason why the unemployment rate just ticked in a different direction,” Hassett said. 

The labor force increased by 485,000 people in September, according to the report, but that’s still a decrease of a million from September 2025. . 

Black unemployment jumped 1 point to 7% for the month, though it also is down from 7.6% in September 2025. 

Health care jobs led September job growth at 16,700. That’s still a slowdown from an average of 33,000 per month over the past year as hospitals continue to seek financial stability. Some health systems had layoffs last month in Vermont and New Hampshire. Government jobs dropped by 17,000, mostly in local governments. 

The freight economy has been reeling from the impact of high diesel prices, and job losses have been announced in that industry. Nonetheless the federal statistics show a monthly job increase of 2,600 in September for truck transportation jobs, but a drop of 4,100 in warehousing and storage jobs. 

An alternative jobs report from payroll processor ADP found a 90,000-job gain in September, with more than half of those coming gains in the Mid-Atlantic region of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.  

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

Hundreds of nurses at 10 SSM Dean Medical Group outpatient clinics in Dane County voted by 71% to form a union last week. 

The union drive of the 340 nurses at the SSM Health clinics comes just months after nurses at SSM St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison voted by 89% to start a union in June. The St. Louis-based Catholic health system has vehemently opposed the union effort from the St. Mary’s nurses, including by trying to get the National Labor Relations Board to invalidate the union election results. 

The St. Mary’s nurses have filed official charges with the NLRB over SSM administration’s refusal to begin negotiating a contract and undertaking anti-union efforts. 

Nurses at both St. Mary’s and the clinics have said they’re working to unionize to better advocate for their patients as the administration makes cuts that force the nurses to do more. The clinic nurses have also tied their effort directly to the system’s treatment of the St. Mary’s nurses.

“For too long, policies have been handed down from SSM executives in St. Louis that force nurses to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources,” said Kat Doebler, a 30-year nurse who works at the SSM Health Outpatient Surgery Center. “This intense focus of extracting corporate profits out of us has led to burnout and the loss of some of our very best nurses. It’s time for the nurses who actually take care of patients to have a seat at the table in the decisions that affect our jobs and how we provide that care. We are very disappointed that instead of respecting our freedom to form a union, SSM has been waging a campaign to violate our rights. Together with our coworkers at St. Mary’s, we’re calling on SSM to stop breaking federal law and start working with us to make sure our clinics and the hospital are the best places to work and receive care.”   

After the SSM administration fought the recognition of the union at St. Mary’s, the system said in a statement that it “respects” the decision of its clinic nurses. 

“We thank every nurse who participated in the recent National Labor Relations Board election at ten of our SSM Health Dean Medical Group outpatient centers in the Madison area,” SSM spokesperson Lisa Adams said. “While we would have preferred an outcome that allowed us to continue working directly with our nurses, we respect their decision and are committed to working constructively through the process ahead. We are grateful for the dedication of our nurses and the care they provide each day. Together, we will continue supporting our patients, serving our communities, and advancing our Mission of providing exceptional health care services to all.”

President Trump has an uncanny knack for speaking to problems that Americans experience —and then taking actions that make  things worse.

Take international  trade, which most Americans see as in need of reform.  Trump talked about getting better deals and helping U.S. workers displaced by NAFTA and other global trade agreements. But  instead of helping working people, he then launched a series of  a trade wars that no one asked for, imposing high tariffs tht triggered retaliation and sent prices for consumer goods soaring, while alienating  close allies like Canada. 

The upcoming G20 ministerial meeting in Milwaukee from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 will feature leaders from around the world coming together to discuss these matters, especially trade, making Wisconsin the stage  for discussing global policy on everything from artificial intelligence to fuel prices.  World leaders including Trump will have the opportunity to hear from  working people, especially those who will take to the streets.

Long before  Trump campaigned on the promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and other “bad deals” for the U.S.,, Ross Perot during his unsuccessful bid for the Presidency in 1992 said he could hear  a “giant sucking sound” from NAFTA, as firms prepared to leave  the U.S. for countries where they could pay workers next to nothing.  That sound became  deafening in Wisconsin after President Bill Clinton signed NAFTA  into law in 1993. 

The deal took a heavy toll on the  dairy industry. Shortly before the agreement, in 1990, our state had about 34,000 operations milking cows.  As of August 2026, we have for the first time dropped below 5,000 licensed dairies. 

Even as the farms closed, production increased , along with exports.  The US Dairy Export Council notes that export values were $656 million in 1995, climbing to $8.32 billion in 2024. Wisconsin participates in these markets sending cheese, fluid milk, and whey to Canada and Mexico mainly.  Moreover, Wisconsin dairies produce about one million pounds of milk more than they did in 1995 – a 33% increase.

But more production hasn’t meant more stability. In fact, more exports have led to greater price volatility, hitting smaller farms harder because they tend to have smaller profit margins.  Adding insult to injury,  long before the Iran war the percent of farm expenses dedicated to fertilizer more than tripled, from about 2% in 2003 to just under 8% in 2025.  Trump’s tariffs, meanwhile, leave farmers especially in Wisconsin even more vulnerable to unforeseen economic disruptions. 

Amid these worsening economic conditions, Trump has campaigned on a promise to help dairy farmers, alleging that the Canadians are “ripping us off.” 

But Canada’s protections for it dairy farmers are not Wisconsin dairy farmers’ problem. In fact, Wisconsin farmers have begun seeking advice from their Canadian counterparts, expressing  interest in  the Canadian system.  Canada’s supply management system assures dairy farmers a fair price as industry stakeholders  including farmers  meet regularly to adjust supply and demand. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s renegotiation of NAFTA, the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) in 2019, did not stop farms from closing as bankruptcies in the Midwest continue to rise.

Global trade agreements, including those negotiated by Trump, failed to deal Wisconsin farmers and  workers a better hand.

From when NAFTA was passed until it became the USMCA, Wisconsin lost nearly 10% of its industrial workforce, or over 46,000 jobs.

On a positive note, according to the High Road Strategy Center’s State of Working Wisconsin Report, years of manufacturing decline seem to be ending as 2025 boasted a record high median wage of $26.17.  Unfortunately for workers, that same report finds that rising inflation will eat into wage gains and inequality is worsening because Black workers are being left behind. 

Under the current global trade regime, workers find themselves between a rock and a hard place.  For instance, workers at CNH Industrial in Racine and Burlington, Iowa, went on strike in 2022 for 260 days and gained a new contract in 2023.  But then, workers at the Racine plant found their company announcing layoffs and plans to shift some production to Mexico in 2024. 

Iconic firms in Milwaukee like Master Lock had their workforces depleted in the 1990s after NAFTA was passed and production moved south. Master Lock totally closed in the city in 2024. 

Workers fed up with being treated like pawns by their corporate employers and elected political leaders  will convene in Milwaukee before and during the G20 talks. 

The day before talks begin, on Sept. 29, Citizen Action of Wisconsin will host a panel of folks representing farmers, labor, and the environment to discuss the current global trade regime and possible alternatives.  The next day, the Milwaukee Labor Council is calling on many of these same groups to stand together and protest. 

In terms of concrete demands, most of the groups attending these events support the recently introduced House Resolution 1286. With 51 co-sponsors and endorsed by multiple organizations, including Citizens Trade Campaign, the AFL-CIO, United Steelworkers (USW), International Association of Machinists (IAM Union), Sierra Club, National Family Farm Coalition, Public Citizen, and others, the Resolution calls on our leaders to include within trade deals fair wages for workers, effective anti-monopoly policies, strong environmental standards, and data protection policies and AI regulations. 

Free trade deals have cost Wisconsin considerably.  Thankfully, the working people hurt by  these deals still have the strength to make their voices heard.  It’s time for our lawmakers and  the other leaders at the G20 to listen to them, and start making deals to benefit working people instead of harming them.

Vice President JD Vance is promoting a Trump administration plan to siphon off federal money that helps working parents afford childcare and use it to subsidize parents who stay at home. The man who ran for office mocking “childless cat ladies” is now trying to stir up a cat fight between working and stay-at-home moms. That’s not remarkable coming from a federal government run by social media trolls. But the main effect of the actual policy Vance is promoting will be to make the lives of already stressed working class families, especially in Wisconsin, even harder, more expensive and noticeably worse than before.

Childcare funding has been in crisis in Wisconsin ever since the pandemic relief money that briefly stabilized providers ran out. Without that money, which “prevented system collapse” according to the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, supporting more than 430,000 children in nearly 6,000 programs, parents are priced out of care and one in four providers say they will likely have to close their doors. 

Unlike Massachusetts and Vermont, Wisconsin does not treat childcare as a state budget priority. Ours is one of only a handful of states including Idaho, Indiana, Nevada and Ohio that failed to spend any money on childcare beyond what was required to draw down federal dollars, according to a 2025 report by the advocacy group ChildCare Aware. In 2026, the state created a new school readiness program for 4-year-olds. It was a first step toward acknowledging the needs of preschoolers and their parents. But it did nothing to address the massive shortage in care for infants and toddlers.

That’s all fine with JD Vance, who wrote on X that “normal Americans care more about their families than their jobs, and want a family policy that doesn’t shunt their kids into crap daycare so they can enjoy more ‘freedom’ in the paid labor force.”

But Vance is not offering to do anything about the fact that the U.S. is the only wealthy nation on Earth that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave, even though 68% of mothers with children under 6 are employed. Nor is he promoting the kind of high-quality early childhood education system that allows parents in Denmark, after their six months of paid parental leave, to enroll their preschoolers in beautiful, enriching childcare programs they don’t have to feel guilty about.

Instead, what Vance is proposing is to take an already paltry federal childcare subsidy and make working parents fight over crumbs with nonworking parents. Mainly, his aim seems to be to punish single parents. That’s not going to leave anyone in good shape — least of all children. 

One of the saddest aspects of the attack on childcare is that very recently parents, educators, business leaders and politicians of both political parties were finally coming together around the idea that childcare is an essential public good that requires public support.

The “mommy wars” attack Vance wants to revive is long out of date. It has been decades since most American families had the luxury of subsisting on a single wage-earner’s income, trad wife fantasies notwithstanding. 

Another major recent breakthrough is policymakers’ realization that the magic of the free market is not going to provide childcare parents can afford. 

“It was the Biden administration that put a ton of money into childcare during COVID, and we learned from that,” says Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. “The lesson was not just the importance of keeping childcare open so that essential workers could work, but the other piece that’s really interesting is that it demonstrated what can positively happen in childcare when you put a little more money into it.”

Thanks to direct payments to providers during the pandemic, center closures dropped off, the number of teachers leaving the workforce slowed down, tuition stopped climbing and, Schmidt says, “this industry for the first time was finally able to say, ‘Our work is important. It is essential to the functioning of our country. It’s worth investing in, because if you invest in it, these positive things can happen.”

Then came Trump. 

Schmidt calls the rollout of Trump policies that slashed supports for families “death by 1,000 cuts.” During the second Trump administration, cuts to food assistance, Medicaid and Head Start, along with the federal government’s move to loosen safety standards and increase staff ratios in childcare centers have taken a huge combined toll on Wisconsin families.

If it were just ideological — if the Trump administration were actually pursuing the kinds of pronatalist policies that make getting married and having children more attractive, as Vance likes to claim, it wouldn’t be as bad. But instead, while spouting rhetoric about valuing families, this administration is subjecting little kids and their parents to more and more misery.

Wisconsin could do more to protect vulnerable kids. Before leaving the Capitol to hit the campaign trail, state legislators failed to pass a bill that would have used state money to fill the gap after federal childcare stabilization funds lapsed. That set off a vicious cycle, says Paula Drew of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association. Subsidies for families were cut and their out-of-pocket payments skyrocketed, so cash-strapped parents withdrew their kids from care. Under-enrollment meant less revenue for childcare centers, so they raised their rates. “It just sort of snowballed,” Drew says. “Programs said things like, ‘We’re gonna have to lower salaries for staff.’ … so I think we’re going to lose our educators, and in fact I think we’ve already lost a big percentage of our skilled, seasoned educators.”

An unintended consequence of the state’s investment in 4-year-old pre-K is that it creates a disincentive to provide care for infants and toddlers, which is already more expensive, Drew says. “Wisconsin serves very few infants and toddlers in regulated care,” she says. “And now, with additional funding going into the Get Kids Ready pre-K program, we expect that to be even lower a year from now.”

To make matters worse, the state no longer has a surplus of federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families funds, which it has used to cover some childcare costs for low-income families. 

Sooner or later, Wisconsin is going to have to start dedicating state revenue to childcare. Schmidt and Drew hope that, with a new governor and a new Legislature, Wisconsin will use the state surplus, payroll taxes or a tax on hemp products and gambling, as Louisiana has done, to subsidize childcare. Only then can Wisconsin reduce the astronomical tuition rates that parents pay ($13,000 for home care and $17,400 for center-based care, according to state data), give providers a better wage (currently $13.55 per hour), and stop the wave of childcare closures. 

They especially want the state to shore up disappearing infant and toddler care and retain experienced teachers — not just by giving them a raise but also by allowing them to continue to get higher education “and make this a profession, not just a fleeting step to something else,” says Drew. 

“We need supply of care; supply means educators that can work in programs. And then we want to help parents pay for care on the demand side. … You can’t do one and not the other, because it simply won’t work,” says Drew. “You can’t just help parents pay for care, but not tend to the supply of care available. And you can’t just tend to the supply of care available, but pretend you don’t see that parents are literally going into poverty to try to pay for childcare.”

“Childcare is infrastructure,” says Schmidt. “If we turned around and said to parents with 5-year-olds, you’ve got to start paying $17,000 a year for your child to be in school, we would see empty classrooms, right? We treat these as two very dramatically different concerns. But all of it is about families’ ability to work outside the home, impact the economy, all those kinds of things. “ 

It’s also about having a decent society that values families and takes good care of children. That’s the kind of society we need to come together and focus on, instead of being distracted by the rage-baiting bluster of internet trolls. 

Nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital in Madison have filed official charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the hospital’s parent company, SSM Health, for allegedly violating federal law by refusing to negotiate a contract with the recently established nurses’ union. 

The hospital’s nurses voted by a landslide earlier this summer to establish a union — a result that SSM fought to prevent the NLRB from recognizing. The efforts of management to prevent the union recognition were rebuffed by federal officials. 

In a news release on Tuesday, the nurses argued that hospital administration is wasting time engaging in anti-union activities when instead negotiations on a labor contract should be getting underway. 

The nurses have complained that the hospital administration has reduced staffing to unsafe levels, putting patient safety at risk. Staffing levels at St. Mary’s are the lowest of Madison’s seven hospitals. 

“SSM should be investing in staffing, support and retention of nurses, not wasting time and resources fighting our union, which is our voice to speak up for our patients,” St. Mary’s nurse Hannah Joers said in a statement released by the union. “Our number one goal is to win a contract which better takes patients’ level of sickness into account for staffing, and makes sure that we keep nurses by the bedside. SSM executives in St. Louis are abusing our empathy, making us do more and more with less and less. We’ve had enough, and the time has come to transform the system so that our patients’ needs come first. We will never back down and we are 1,000% determined to win a strong contract to provide the highest quality patient care.”

Labor union membership continues to climb in the United States, though the increase remains sharply divided by the politics of individual states.

Last year, the nation added more than 411,000 union members — the largest annual growth since 2008, according to a study published just ahead of the Labor Day holiday by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

At the end of last year, more than 14.6 million American workers belonged to a union — about 10% of the workforce, the study said. 

While union membership grew across the country, the State of the Unions report found that states that have sought to protect or strengthen collective bargaining rights added three times as many union members as so-called right-to-work states, which prohibit mandatory union membership or dues as conditions of employment.

“What seems to be the number one driver is the state of the state,” said one of the study authors, Robert Bruno, who leads the labor education program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “If the policy is anti-union, it suppresses worker will. Where the law allows worker will to flourish, as I would argue it should, then you see higher numbers. So you can’t ignore politics. You can’t ignore policy.” 

State governments are nearly evenly divided on labor policy, with 26 states having right-to-work laws. Union membership rates sit at about 14% in collective bargaining states and 5% in right-to-work states, the study found.

The study shows that workers in collective bargaining states earn significantly more than those in other states. After adjusting for cost of living variances, the report calculated average hourly earnings of $34.16 in right-to-work states and $37.24 in collective bargaining states.

Union density is nowhere close to its record high. In 1954, more than a third of American workers belonged to unions. Today, that rate is about 10%.  And unions face major policy headwinds at the state and federal levels. In recent years, Southern states have passed new laws aimed at curbing union expansion. And President Donald Trump has sought to strip collective bargaining rights from more than 1 million federal workers. 

Researchers said it’s unclear how federal actions will affect union membership figures. Many of the president’s moves are being litigated in courts and more federal workers have sought to unionize under this administration. 

But public support for labor unions is growing among Republicans and Democrats, Gallup polling shows. 

“More Americans are turning to unions as a bulwark against the rising cost of living, and more public sector workers turned towards unions last year in the wake of some federal actions and federal headwinds,” said State of the Unions coauthor Frank Manzo IV, an economist at the left-leaning Illinois Economic Policy Institute. 

Conservatives have long argued that unions’ benefit on wage growth has been overstated by pro-labor interests. 

In a 2025 review of 147 studies, researchers at the free-market think tank Mercatus Center concluded that powerful labor unions can lead to slower job growth and fewer jobs for unionized workers, reduce company investments in research and development, and increase the likelihood of company closures. 

Researchers at the George Mason University think tank said the difference between the wages of unionized workers and nonunionized workers has declined in recent years and may even be negligible. 

“When powerful and adversarial unions operate with government-granted monopoly privileges and press for unsustainable terms, it can backfire and result in lost jobs and fewer opportunities for workers,” that report said.

This year, state lawmakers passed dozens of bills seeking to boost worker protections across 19 states, according to tracking by State Futures, a nonprofit coordinating hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states.

Those measures included three bills aimed at expanding collective bargaining.

Illinois lawmakers granted rideshare and gig drivers the right to organize and to bargain collectively. Washington state extended collective bargaining rights to certain university student employees.

And Virginia lawmakers approved a measure to repeal the state’s longstanding ban on public-sector collective bargaining. That would have expanded the possibility of union membership to half a million public employees in the commonwealth. But Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed that measure in May. 

The governor said she agreed with the goal of expanding collective bargaining rights. But she urged the legislature to adopt specific amendments, including delaying provisions of the bill until 2030 and shifting authority over how the system operates to a state board. 

“While preserving the enrolled bill’s focus on allowing public employees to achieve collective bargaining, my amendments would have also provided additional flexibility for public employers to take into account existing local budget timelines and processes,” Spanberger wrote in her veto message. “However, the General Assembly rejected these amendments.”

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

Wage gains for lower-paid Wisconsin workers have continued in 2026, but a halt in job creation suggests that might not last, says the author of a new report released ahead of Labor Day.

“The State of Working Wisconsin 2026” tells a good news-bad news story for Wisconsin’s workforce, but one that could become less favorable under current conditions.

“For working people in Wisconsin, the Labor Day 2026 picture is mixed,” the report states. “While overall unemployment remains low, the state isn’t adding jobs and Black unemployment is growing. While the median wage has reached an all-time high, surging inflation in 2026 means that wage growth is likely coming to an end.”

The report is a product of the High Road Strategy Center, based at the University of Wisconsin. It was written by Laura Dresser, the center’s associate director, along with Joel Rogers, the director, and Leslie Vasquez. The center was founded 30 years ago as the Center on Wisconsin Strategies (COWS).

The report’s best news is the continued wage growth, particularly for lower-wage workers, Dresser said in an interview. That has been consistent since about 2018, she said.

Except for a period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when many businesses cut back and there was a brief, sharp increase in layoffs, the unemployment rate has also been consistently low, and employers have complained about the difficulty in filling jobs.

“Workers have more bargaining power, and they’ve managed to turn that into wage increases,” Dresser said. “That’s much more true in the lower-wage jobs than it is in the higher wage jobs.”

The lowest-paid 20% of workers have made the strongest wage gains, while the wage increases have been the smallest for the workers whose pay puts them in the 80th percentile —those who earn more than 80% of the workforce — she said.

Job growth, however, has slowed down in the last year and a half.

“Since late 2024, Wisconsin’s job market has gone flat,” the report states. From 2020 through most of 2024, Wisconsin’s economy was steadily adding jobs, setting new records.

In November 2024, the state hit a record high of 3,051,000 jobs, according to the report. Since then the total number of jobs has diminished, marking 3,042,900 jobs in July.

“We are not seeing increasing numbers of jobs over the last year and a half,” Dresser said — which, she observed, is parallel to a national trend of “anemic” job growth.

The construction industry remains particularly strong in Wisconsin job growth, according to the report, with jobs growing at twice the rate for construction jobs nationwide in the last six years, according to the report.

Wisconsin leisure and hospital jobs grew 1.6% in that period, while nationally they “barely grew at all,” according to the report. And manufacturing jobs are 4% below what they were in February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

“Wisconsin is losing manufacturing jobs and losing them much more rapidly than the national decline,” the report states.

Tariff policies have shifted unpredictably since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 owing both to shifting policies in the administration as well as court cases that have overturned some of the administration’s tariffs.

The report cites research from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., that concludes the tariff policies have done little to change the nation’s balance of trade with other countries, while reducing both imports and exports.

Wage growth could be coming to an end as well. If unemployment increases, workers may feel less able to seek better pay and working conditions, according to the report.

In 2026, inflation has driven up costs particularly for energy, fuel and utilities. “And national evidence is that inflation is growing faster than wage growth this year — that’s a big warning light that we’ll get thrown off that wage trend we’ve been on,” Dresser said.

While wage gains have been especially strong for Black workers over the last six years in Wisconsin — increasing 17% for Black women and 14% for Black men — the report also sees a persistent inequality along racial lines.

“Unemployment has stayed really low, but in the last year Black unemployment has gone up by a full percentage point while white unemployment has held steady,” Dresser said.

The failure of Wisconsin to raise the state minimum wage — which remains at $7.25 an hour — and the persistence of state laws enacted in the last decade weakening unions for public employees as well as in the private sector are also making it more difficult for workers, according to the report.

“Unions, made up of working people, help increase the power and standards of living of working people,” the report states. And they have been actively organizing in Wisconsin, although the renewed enthusiasm for unions hasn’t yet produced broad gains in membership, which has diminished to 5% of the private sector workforce.

Affordability has become a widespread buzzword in political campaigns for 2026, and the report suggests that can be viewed in more than one way.

“While the question of affordability is generally framed as a problem of the cost of living, the problem is equally or even better understood as a problem of suppressed pay,” the report states. “Raising the minimum wage and making it easier to join a union would both increase paychecks.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) walked through the shelves of pasta, olive oil, tinned fish and frozen pizzas at Fraboni’s Italian deli in Monona on Thursday as part of her statewide tour assessing how President Donald Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran are affecting small businesses. 

In May, the owners of the third-generation family business said that tariffs and increased gas prices had caused the cost of fresh tomatoes to increase about 40%. That price hike included domestically grown tomatoes because tariffs that increased the cost of imported tomatoes pushed up  demand for domestic tomatoes, while higher gas prices made even nearby crops more expensive to ship.
Store co-owner Bennett Fraboni added that his deli had done its best to avoid passing the increased cost of products on to its customers. 

“We always hope that it’s going to be a temporary increase, and that we can swallow it ourselves and not have to pass it on,” Fraboni said.

The deli, which has operated in the Madison area since 1971, sells Italian grocery items and operates a popular sandwich counter. Fraboni said that as the economy has fluctuated over the past year, he’s seen the two sides of the business move independently. When money is tight, he said, people are less likely to go out to eat, so sandwich counter sales slow but the sales of grocery items increase as people look to cook at home more. 

Baldwin said that hearing these stories from businesses across the state is especially frustrating because U.S. economic struggles are “self-inflicted.” 

Traveling the state during the Senate recess, she has heard from small business owners about the challenges they are facing because of  tariffs, trade wars and Trump’s war of choice in Iran, she said. “In many ways, they describe a very chaotic environment — volatile — and recognize that a lot of these things that are causing challenges for our small businesses are choices that this administration has made.”

Democrats across the country are  pushing a message about “affordability” and highlighting voters’ worries about high prices. While Congress doesn’t usually have a simple policy solution for lowering the prices of household expenses, Baldwin said if Democrats take control they can immediately act to end Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war. 

“The type of policies that this president has engaged in are extremely harmful to the consumer and to our small businesses and to our farmers who are producing these products,” Baldwin said.