By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter

 

MADISON — While October marked the fourth consecutive month of contraction in the Badger State’s labor market, recall fever is sweeping Wisconsin politics. And a top Republican wonders if the political turmoil is weakening the will of employers to expand.

In an interview with Wisconsin Reporter, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch said she worries about what she describes as the distractions of recall campaigns on business investment and expansion.

 

Kleefisch and Gov. Scott Walker, along with four Republican state senators, are targets of a massive recall campaign, led by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the liberal political action committee United Wisconsin.

“Our governor has worked incredibly hard to make sure we have laid the framework for economic prosperity,” she said. “We need certainty and stability in the financial climate of the state in order for job creators to invest.

“It’s a concern of mine that … our political differences continue to be the story. We want job creation to be the story.”

But the recall campaign is Wisconsin’s story, making the state the epicenter of political news nationally, just as the jobs numbers are reported, though the rate of unemployment did drop.

 

Economic 'exposure'

 

Wisconsin's private-sector employers cut 9,300 jobs last month, the vast majority of the 9,700 total non-farm jobs the economy shed, according to employment figures released Thursday from the state Department of Workforce Development, or DWD,

 

The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in Wisconsin in October was 7.7 percent, down slightly from 7.8 percent. The national unemployment rate stood at 9 percent for the month.

 

Year over year, the private sector added 14,500 jobs since October 2010, but the big employment gains earlier this year have been swallowed up and 14,500 is a long way from Walker’s original pledge of 250,000 new jobs.

 

“Wisconsin’s unemployment rate decreased over the month, and our state’s labor market has improved over the course of this year, but the decline in total jobs over the month reaffirms our exposure to challenges in the national and global economy,” DWD Secretary Reggie Newson said in a news release.

 

Newson, new to the post following Scott Baumbach’s departure last month, plugged the need to “advance the governor’s job-creation agenda and ensure job seekers have the skills that are in demand by employers who are looking to locate or expand in Wisconsin.”

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, countered that the Walker agenda is the wrong way to go, asserting that Wisconsin has lost jobs every month since the governor signed his “regressive budget in June” — a decline of 27,600.

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that the results of Gov. Walker’s ‘reforms’ are more jobs lost and longer unemployment lines,” Barca said in a news release.

 

Housing stops

Still, October’s job losses had much to do with some of the seasonal shifts, albeit driven by economic weakness, economy watchers said. Construction typically begins to slow down in October, more so this year due to lingering troubles in the housing market.

“You’ve just come off the end of a soft construction season, as they prepare for winter,” said Dick Granchalek, president of the La Crosse Area Chamber of Commerce. “Construction crews (in the homebuilding industry) already are down … to the owner and one or two key employees, and I think you are seeing a diminishing willingness of those companies to keep those going right now.”

Nationwide, housing starts declined 0.3 percent, to an annual rate 628,000 properties, and September’s starts were slower than originally noted, the U.S. Commerce Department reported Thursday.

Some suggest there’s more to the state’s economic malaise than global forces and anemic housing starts.

 

Uncertainty is a certainty

Granchalek said uncertainty among the business community never helps an economy, and Wisconsin has plenty of uncertainty — not just in the potential of unprecedented recall elections but in the 2012 campaign and elections coming on strong.

Still, Granchalek said linking the recent round of job losses to Wisconsin’s tense political atmosphere would be a stretch.

 

Scott Furlong agreed. The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay political science professor said the uncertainty claim may be a matter of muddying the political waters.

 

“In many ways that’s a political ploy as well as raising the fear factor as to why the Democrats shouldn’t be” pushing the recall campaigns, he said. “That’s a tough sell, I think.”

 

Furlong said the ongoing nature of the ever-election cycle these days makes sitting on the sidelines in hopes of political change ineffective policy-making and a bad business plan.

 

But the lieutenant governor said the recall campaigns in general are having a more profound effect on the democratic process.

 

“My concern is we are invalidating the results of the elections that we have done, invalidating the decisions that we made a year ago,” Kleefisch said. “We have done the job the taxpayers of Wisconsin have elected us to do, and we’ve done our jobs thus far.”