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The U.S. Department of Labor recently announced a proposal to set the salary threshold under which American workers are entitled to overtime pay to about $35,300 a year. While the Trump administration is touting the rule as a way to bring “common sense, consistency, and higher wages to working Americans,” the adoption of this new rule would leave behind millions of working people who would have gotten overtime protections under the 2016 guidelines by the Obama administration. Federal law requires that people working more than 40 hours a week be paid 1.5 times their pay rate for the extra...

Public support for cannabis is growing, but GOP lawmakers mostly oppose the plan by Governor Tony Evers to legalize medical cannabis and possession of small amounts. Gary Storck has been here before. For decades, Storck, a longtime medical marijuana advocate from Madison, has been pushing the state Legislature to legalize his medicine. Storck suffers from glaucoma. He uses cannabis to slow progression of the disease, which is gradually robbing him of his sight. The first big moment was in 2002, when statewide polling found that 80.3 percent of Wisconsinites supported medical marijuana. Storck was ecstatic. When he first heard...

April 2 was National Equal Pay Day, which marked how long women have to work into this year to catch up to what men earned in the previous year, on average. Women of color must work even longer into this year to bring their 2018-19 earnings up to the same level as men’s earnings from last year. Race and gender-based pay disparities devalue women, especially women of color, and rob them of opportunities to achieve financial security and establish wealth. Workers should not pay a penalty for being female or of color. But in Wisconsin, women – and especially...

Everyone in Wisconsin deserves the opportunity to fully benefit from the state’s economic growth. Our economy, our communities, our schools, and our families will fare better when every person in the state has full access to opportunity. A new budget framework from the Wisconsin Budget Project shows how effective investments in the state’s families, schools, and communities, can promote full opportunity and move Wisconsin along the path to shared prosperity. For our state to be competitive and prosperous, we also need to remove the structural barriers to opportunity for people of color. To fund the investments that expand opportunity...