Category: In the News

“It’s important for Milwaukee to see itself as a national leader in this way and to reapply the lessons from the Deer District as new development is considered,” says Laura Dresser, associate director of COWS. Dresser is coauthor of the report along with Pablo Aquiles-Sanchez, a COWS research analyst.

“There is this thing that’s changed about what we do when we’re sick, when our kids are sick, what our child cares will accept or tolerate when our kids are sick,” Dresser said. “I think people send their kids or themselves to school or work sick less often than we used to.”

Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said the labor shortage may make some companies more likely to violate protections for minors. “It is probably the case that tight labor markets mean that there may be more sorts of violations like this because firms are desperate to …

“I don’t want to give the impression that this is some sort of workers’ paradise in any sector,” Dresser said. The tight labor market gave employees some additional power, “but there’s a lot of ways that power has shifted against workers over the last 40 years that one year doesn’t really make up for.”

“I think that we have a context where workers, individually and collectively, are demanding more of work,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of the University of Wisconsin–Madison think tank COWS. In this booming labor market, she said, workers know they can find another job if needed. “Their exit threat is so …

“What a ‘flat tax’ does in Wisconsin is let the richest residents of the state off the hook for taxes,” said Laura Dresser, Associate Director, [COWS], University of Wisconsin- Madison. “The state doesn’t need policy that redistributes wealth up the income chain.”

Despite the gains, racial and gender disparities persist, a report by [COWS] at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found… “The distance that black and brown workers are from white workers in terms of wages is substantial,” COWS associate director Laura Dresser, a labor economist, told Wisconsin Watch.

Laura Dresser, associate director of the COWS economic think tank at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said tight labor markets and the COVID-19 pandemic have put more power in the hands of workers. “I think workers feel like they learned something about their value during the pandemic, and they don’t see that honored,” Dresser said. “And …

Laura Dresser, a labor economist and associate director of [COWS], a progressive policy organization, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect that the push to erode child labor protections is “less about getting people to pack groceries at 9:00 at night, and more about using every chance you have to use the labor shortage to make …

“Workers have a sense of the leverage and the value they have,” said labor economist Laura Dresser, an associate director for [COWS] at UW–Madison. “You can see that in the high rate of churn.”