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Get the latest news and research from Badger Institute
- Florida could teach Wisconsin how to demand a more open-minded academia
- Wisconsin still holds $800 million in people’s unclaimed cash despite a top ranking in returning funds
- More Wisconsin circuit courts use text reminders to move justice along: a ‘godsend’
- How to strengthen the climb from the safety net
- The silence breaks: Accountability at last for those who make Milwaukee life unlivable
- Data centers could be a godsend — if communities let them
- Economic freedom is worth defending — even when political parties forget it
- Wisconsin is missing its Medicaid accountability moment
Browsing: Work
Wisconsin’s next governor and Legislature should strengthen the state’s safety net by focusing it more clearly on work, family stability and upward mobility.
The ratio of working-age Wisconsin residents to retirement-age ones has reached its lowest level since 1930.
Economic freedom is a fundamental animating idea of the republic that people should be free to work, build, hire, save, invest, trade and make their own economic choices without unnecessary interference from government.
The solution to problems left by grocery store closures in Milwaukee may include a civil-society option such as a food co-op, observers say.
Union membership in Wisconsin has continued to decline in the past two years.
Wisconsin’ recent failures of accountability share a common feature: Power has increasingly shifted away from the Legislature and toward governors, agencies, courts and other institutions that operate further from direct democratic control.
Full-time employment for Wisconsin young adults fell between 2023 and 2024, the most recent year for which data are available.
The comparison to Milwaukee’s past Socialist mayors highlights how proposals by current Democratic Socialists are much more radical, even if they’re rhetorically similar.
Students learn less and earn less when they have less incentive to actually study in order to get top grades.
There is new evidence that some students hurt themselves economically by going to college — a fact Republicans are using to limit student loans.
The law, passed in 2023, decrees that venues rented for private events at which the people holding the party bring their own alcohol can host only six such events a year, and only one a month — unless they prohibit bring-your-own drinks and instead get a liquor license like a tavern. Those are subject to strict quotas. Town board can simply refuse.
A decline in cargo moving across the Great Lakes via United States-flagged “lakers” has led to widely felt impacts in port towns, including at a major Superior coal terminal now slated to shutter its operations by this upcoming summer.
While undergraduate enrollment in most University of Wisconsin System schools trends downward, there has been a dramatic increase in students choosing the state’s technical colleges since the pandemic.
Job postings in Wisconsin, which had been falling since a 2022 peak following pandemic disruptions, have steadied over the past 10 months, data from the Indeed Hiring Lab show.
Technical college graduates and small business owners will be big winners in the massive Vantage Data Centers development soon expected to become the largest employer in Port Washington.
Business leaders and educators are concerned about the future of the workforce in the Badger State — and debating whether many young Wisconsinites are just lazy.
And the real reason Wisconsin won’t join the modern world and let cars operate without drivers With automated, driverless robotaxis…
There are 541 days until the next Legislature’s sworn in, and there’s plenty of unfinished business
A federal judge’s injunction is blocking the closing down Job Corps centers — including two in Wisconsin — that have an expensive and dismal record ostensibly training the young and disadvantaged for work.
More than half of the employees in the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development and more than 40% in the Department of Administration still work remotely, five years after COVID sent them home.

