Where do wages increase the most in America? This is an important state – Wisconsin

Photographer: Brendan SMialowski / AFP via Getty Images

Perhaps no investment project in the U.S. has been as controversial in recent years as Foxconn’s construction of a manufacturing complex in Wisconsin. Between the multi-billion dollar tax offerings and Foxconn’s rapid scaling up of investment plans, critics have blown the deal unforgivably as business well-being.

But for all its flaws, the project now seems to be playing a role in a whole other storyline that began to appear: Workers’ wages in that corner of Wisconsin, right along the southwestern edge of Lake Michigan, are climbing faster than in any other part of the country.

Two of the region’s metropolitan areas – Fond du Lac, just north of Milwaukee, and Racine, just south – rank first and fifth nationwide in wage incomes, with both placement increases of more than 25% in July from a year earlier. A third metropolitan area, Sheboygan, ranks 35th – out of a total of 389 in the US, according to data released last week.

It is a surprising development in a state that, by all accounts, will be one of the most important field jobs in the November presidential election.

While much of Wisconsin’s economy is sputtering – its massive milk factories have been hit hard by President Donald Trump’s trade wars and the pandemic – the Foxconn project Exhibit A is a growing investment boom in manufacturing around Milwaukee that is a major bright spot has become.

Companies including Advent Tool & Manufacturing and Nexus Pharmaceuticals and the candy maker Haribo has recently set up operations in the area or announced plans to do so.

When Foxconn, a Taiwan-based electronics giant, began renting in Racine, it helped the province’s wage gains reach its highest on record. (The province held the No. 1 spot in wage increases nationwide for several months in 2019.)

Not even the pandemic has had much of a cooling effect on the region. Unemployment rates fell sharply below 10% after rising in April, the pace of wage increases has slowed and consumers continue to spend at a red-hot clip.

“The Foxconn development has already made major investments in construction and manufacturing,” US said Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the district and also the Future of Work Caucus co-founder.

Democrats, thinking that Trump unexpectedly won the state in 2016 with less than 23,000 votes, planned to hold their convention in Milwaukee this past week until they opted instead for a fully virtual event. Trump, who held the Foxconn deal with then-Wisconsin alderman Scott Walker in 2017, traveled to Wisconsin on Monday. Two days later, Vice President Mike Pence told me.

‘Coolness Factor’

The arrival of these manufacturers to the area is creating labor buttons that drive wage gains, said Kevin Muhs, executive director of the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

“There’s been a very pronounced shift after moving to the Milwaukee area – there’s a coolness factor,” said Zach Messitte, president of Ripon College, where Pence spoke in July. “The area is an affordable option and there are a lot of jobs.”

Low pay was traditionally part of that affordability. The state has kept its minimum wage at just $ 7.25-an-hour, the lowest level allowed by the federal government in more than a decade. Racine Mayor Cory Mason has been among those politicians who – without fail – pushed to increase it to $ 15-an-hour, which would put it on par with coastal cities, including San Francisco and New York.

A quick read of the jobs site ONLY.com shows that Foxconn has a lot opening at the planting site. They offer at least $ 15-an-hour. And some promise as much as $ 75,000 a year.

More than 1,000 local workers and 100 businesses have been involved in the development of Foxconn’s technology park in Wisconsin, according to an April letter from the company to the state’s economic development bureau. The letter also said that Foxconn employed more than 550 people at the end of last year.

Although it is still too short of what was promised in exchange for $ 4.5 billion in government incentives – one of the largest packages of public subsidy issued to a foreign company in U.S. history – the work facility that the project ended since forward 2019, when Bloomberg reported that Foxconn was hiring at a glacial pace and that investment goals were repeatedly revised.

Last year, Moody’s Investors Service raised concerns about Racine’s finances, citing the more than $ 100 million in debt the province took to help the state offer the incentive package. Standard & Poor’s has been more active about the project. The plant, S&P said in a March report, “should have a dramatic effect on the local and regional economy.”

– With the help of Austin Carr, Debby Wu, and Shruti Singh

(Updates with release of data in third member.)