Public employees in Wisconsin left their jobs at record rates last year. That’s according to a recent report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which found there was a big loss of public employees, with less experienced employees filling vacancies.
Across school districts, state agencies, police departments and more, Wisconsin’s state and local governments employ hundreds of thousands of workers, but that number has fallen during the pandemic and has not kept pace with the state’s population for decades.
In 2021, Wisconsin’s state and local governments and school districts counted just under 277,800 full-time equivalent employees, the fewest on a per-capita basis in two decades. While the pandemic played a role, years of tight school revenue limits and local property tax caps also likely contributed. Other factors may include technology, rising healthcare costs and declining school enrollments. Average pay for these Wisconsin workers also declined relative to the nation, though that may reflect lagging incomes for all workers in the state.
"In 2020, this is something that I think really stood out to us and one of the reasons that we wanted to take a deeper look at this data because, you know, these kind of one year spikes are something that usually spurs us to ask, like, why is this happening," Ari Brown, a senior research associate with the Wisconsin Policy Forum explains.
Given the state’s aging workforce and tight labor market, these trends are to some degree inevitable and may not be bad in every respect. Younger workers, for example, are typically less costly for public employers and taxpayers because they start at lower salaries. They also may be more familiar with new technology and more willing to adjust to new approaches to doing their jobs. At the same time, however, the rise in turnover rates for public employers represents an additional cost in terms of recruitment, training and disruption, and the loss of experienced employees could affect the quality of services delivered, particularly when it is difficult to hire replacements.
"You lose institutional knowledge, you lose expertise, and at the same time you also have to hire and expand you know, resources, hiring for all those employees that are leaving the system," Brown says.
The report finds that ultimately, the quality of public services in Wisconsin is a function of the people delivering them; for that reason, state and local officials have good reasons to watch these trends.
