By Rachel Ver Velde
Wisconsin is where we live, work, and raise our families. It’s where we planted roots, found opportunities, and built stable lives. For us, Wisconsin is home. But the reality is hard to ignore: Our state is falling behind, and our demographic and workforce trends pose a threat to our future. These forces are reshaping the state’s workforce, economy, and long term outlook. To reverse these trends and save Wisconsin, we must pursue an agenda to retain and attract Wisconsin workers.
As elaborated in The WMC Foundation’s recent Wisconsin Competitiveness Report, a brief glance at Wisconsin’s demographic and workforce trends paints a bleak picture. The median age in Wisconsin is 40.7 — more than a year older than the national average — and residents age 65 and older make up 19.2% of the population, compared to 18% nationally. While Wisconsin ages, our youth population continues to shrink at an unprecedented rate.
Wisconsin lost a staggering 40,000 residents under 18 from 2020 to 2024. If this trend continues, we are on pace to lose a projected 95,000 young people this decade — nearly the population of Wisconsin’s fourth largest city, Kenosha. Additionally, projections now indicate that the state will lose nearly 200,000 residents between 2020 and 2050 — roughly double the population of Kenosha.
Wisconsin’s demographic dilemma has clearly affected the workforce. The labor force participation rate peaked in 1997 and has declined since. Last year, it hit a record low, with less than 65 percent of residents working or seeking work, lower than April 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is a tragic reality for our state’s future.
The aforementioned risks and dangers for Wisconsin’s workforce should serve as a wake-up call for Wisconsin lawmakers. We should aim to enact policies that encourage and incentivize work. Unfortunately, in Wisconsin, current practices achieve the opposite.
Wisconsin’s public assistance programs, including FoodShare (food stamps) and unemployment benefits, are currently structured to incentivize perpetual unemployment. State law requires work and drug-testing requirements for FoodShare recipients, but enforcement of these requirements is often inconsistent. Poor enforcement encourages poor behavior.
Similarly, Gov. Tony Evers has proposed eliminating work or training requirements for able-bodied adults on FoodShare while also expanding unemployment benefits and easing work search requirements, changes that would pay more to people to not work.
Instead of incentivizing work, Wisconsin is moving in the opposite direction. For many workers — especially younger Wisconsinites — the gap between entry-level wages and overly generous government benefits has narrowed to the point that staying out of the workforce is an increasingly viable option.
Although Wisconsin’s demographic dilemma isn’t something that can be fixed overnight, commonsense solutions to combat our workforce issues are actionable and attainable.
To upskill our workforce, we should ensure that existing and future workers have the resources they need to progress and advance in their careers. Wisconsin’s current workforce efforts should be strengthened to better connect workers with open jobs. Additionally, schools need to do more to expose students to high-paying careers in manufacturing, construction, and other skilled trades through Career Technical Education (CTE) programming, employer visits, and credit apprenticeship opportunities.
In addition to upskilling workers for new opportunities, we must bring individuals from the sidelines into the workforce.
You don’t have to be a particularly deep thinker to understand that incentives encourage behavior — it’s a basic fact. With that in mind, tackling our state’s workforce challenges should be quite simple.
Workforce growth requires clear incentives.
Wisconsin should enforce existing work requirements for FoodShare and unemployment benefits and ensure able-bodied adults without dependents are working, seeking work, or participating in training.
Unemployment benefits should be better aligned with labor market conditions, with benefit duration tied to the unemployment rate. The state should also strengthen enforcement by auditing work search activities and denying benefits to individuals who decline job offers or fail to participate in interviews.
Wisconsin’s workforce crisis is real, measurable, and solvable — but only if policymakers choose incentives that reward work and skill building. If we want to remain competitive, we must stop normalizing policies that sideline workers and instead adopt reforms that grow our labor force and strengthen career pathways. Wisconsin’s future depends on it.
