We’re back with the latest installment of You Be the Judge, where our team of independent fact-checkers looks at a claim, puts it in context, goes beyond the carefully worded claim to break down the issues, presents all the facts and then lets you be the judge on whether it holds water.
We’re now less than two weeks away from Election Day, and both Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic candidate for governor Mary Burke continue to make their final arguments to the people of Wisconsin.
Central to this election, no doubt, is the issue of job creation. Scott Walker famously promised in his 2010 campaign for governor to create 250,000 new private sector jobs in his first term in office, a claim we’ve reviewed in this space previously and one that PolitiFact has rightly determined a “promise broken.”
The latest, most accurate federal jobs numbers available, the Quarterly Census of Wages and Employment (QCEW) figures that Walker has referred to as the “gold standard,” show Wisconsin ranked dead last in the Midwest in terms of private sector job creation and trailing most of the rest of the nation as we grow jobs at just about half the national average.
State Jobs Website’s Listings Are Misleading
So it was a surprise to the team here at “You Be the Judge” when we heard the governor claim in the first debate earlier this month that Wisconsin doesn’t have a “jobs problem,” but rather a “work problem.” Dead last in the Midwest in private sector job growth sure sounds like a jobs problem for Wisconsin, just like being dead last in the Big Ten would be a problem for our Wisconsin Badgers.
But Gov. Walker explained his comments by noting that the state jobs website, jobcenterofwisconsin.com, has more than 70,000 job postings right now—plenty of jobs for people who want to work.
That’s a claim PolitiFact rated “Mostly True” and that’s the claim we’ll be looking at this week. PolitiFact noted another similar set of remarks from Walker at a campaign stop near Milwaukee in September. “Jobs are not the problem,” Walker said. “Connecting people to those jobs with the skills they need and, more importantly, getting people off of the couch and off the dependence who are able and into those jobs, making it more effective, a bigger incentive for them to get back to work is really the difference.”
Now, 70,000 jobs wouldn’t put every Wisconsinite back to work, but it’s a great start. So we’ll take a look at whether the claim holds up and what kinds of jobs are posted.
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As evidence for his claim, the Walker administration offered up to PolitiFact a spreadsheet detailing more than 79,000 jobs, well above the number Walker cited. But that doesn’t tell the whole story.
The first red flag is a claim from the nonpartisan watchdog group One Wisconsin Now that 13,000 of the jobs posted aren’t in Wisconsin but in neighboring states like Iowa, Minnesota and Illinois. The Department of Workforce Development doesn’t dispute One Wisconsin Now’s findings. Jobs created in other states don’t count toward Wisconsin’s job creation, so that brings the total down to about 66,000.
Next problem we see is that only 41,000 of the 79,000 jobs posted have been verified by the state and are set to expire after 90 days. Some of these job postings could have been filled but still appear on the site. The remaining postings come from national firms and have not been verified by the state, meaning they could be expired, already filled or duplicate postings.
We know that Wisconsinites are hard workers. So it was already a stretch to believe that our “jobs problem” was actually a “work problem” caused by unemployed folks who just aren’t motivated enough to go out and secure one of the 79,000 jobs Scott Walker is advertising on the state’s website. The data shows that thousands of these jobs aren’t even in Wisconsin and tens of thousands more can’t be verified. Are there really 79,000 jobs just waiting to be filled but for workers not taking the initiative to apply? You be the judge.
