Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Right-to-Work Legislation Showing Solid Gains
Right-to-Work Legislation Showing Solid Gains
Apr 4, 2025 4:38 PM

It may not be the silver bullet for every financial challenge facing states at the present, but those states adopting right-to-work (RTW) legislation are ing petitive. In your writer’s native Michigan, for example, RTW was signed by Gov. Rick Snyder in December 2012, and the results have been impressive. The American Legislative Exchange Council’s recently released 2014 “Rich States, Poor States” report places the Great Lakes State 12th out of 50. ALEC’s 2013 report placed Michigan at 25 between 1999 and 2009, and 17 in 2012. Michigan was ranked 50th in ALEC’s Economic Performance Ranking, which measures states’ economic performance between 2002 and 2009. Although RTW only accounts for one of the 15 variables ALEC considers, it places RTW and taxes at the top of the list:

[T]he two policy decisions that have the biggest impact on growth among the states are 1) the highest e tax rate faced by business and individuals, and 2) whether a state has forced-union policies or right-to-work statutes allowing workers to opt out of unions. If states are right-to-work and keep their corporate and personal e taxes low, and all other factors are held constant, this should go a long way to making those states a place where jobs, people, and capital move. Sure enough, our latest analysis covering 2002-2012 confirms this conclusion once again….

A survey of the literature on the economic effects of right-to-work laws confirms what the data above shows. Literature reviews done by two separate teams of researchers—Dr. Randall Pozdena and Dr. Eric Fruits, as well as Dr. Michael Hicks and Michael LaFaive—find significant support for the theory that right-to-work policies boost economic performance.In addition, both research teams’ own personal economic e to similar conclusions that conform with the academic consensus.

Workers are apparently starting to understand the negative effects of unions on jobs and overall economic improvement. In early 2014, the workers at a Volkswagen plant in right-to-work Chattanooga, TN famously voted down a United Auto Workers bid to unionize the plant. Many workers at the plant said they worried that a union would bankrupt the plant, sending their jobs elsewhere, and turn Chattanooga into bankrupt Detroit.

Yet, Vice President Joe Biden was in Detroit this past Labor Day, telling a crowd of union supporters: “Folks, there is something wrong with this picture…. We have got to restore the bargain established by unions…. If we don’t, America is in real trouble.”

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy – a free-market, Michigan-based think tank – championed RTW. In 2013, the Center’s Economic Policy Director Michael LaFaive (full disclosure: your writer is a former Mackinac Center employee and has retained a personal friendship with LaFaive) and Michael Hicks authored the study “Economic Growth and Right-to-Work Laws.” In their Executive Summary, they explain:

From 1971 through 1990, however, right-to-work laws increased average annual employment and real personal e growth by about 0.9 percentage points and increased average annual population growth by 1.3 percentage points. Further, from 1991 through 2011, the effect in each category was slightly smaller than in the previous period, but each was still statistically significant.

These results suggest that right-to-work laws have a positive and sometimes very positive impact on the economic well-being of states and their residents. Indeed, the study’s findings show that right-to-work laws, on average, cause a one-time, permanent increase in the rate of economic growth in states. Since this study deploys a new econometric model to measure the impact of right-to-work laws, it should be an important contribution to the growing research on this issue. Policymakers interested in improving their state’s economic performance should take note of the study’s findings.

And this from the study’s conclusion:

This study examines the impact of right-to-work laws on three measures of state-level aggregate economic activity (employment, real personal e and population) from 1947 through 2011. It deploys a careful temporal analysis of these effects and attempts to isolate the specific effect right-to-work laws had on individual states.

This research suggests that from 1947 through 1970 (the period immediately following the Taft-Hartley Act), right-to-work laws had very little meaningful statistical impact on overall economic performance in right-to-work states. However, from 1971 through1990, when manufacturing employment in the United States began to languish, right-to-work laws demonstrated a statistically significant effect on these measures. Finally, over the course of roughly the last two decades, from 1991through 2011, right-to-work laws’ impact on state economic well-being has moderately slowed, but remains considerable.

These findings suggest that right-to-work laws may have a positive — at times very positive — impact on the economic well-being of a state and its residents.

“Right-to-work simply means that a union cannot get a worker fired for not paying them. It does not affect collective bargaining in any other way,” Vincent F. Vernuccio, Mackinac Center’s director of Labor Policy, told me. “Workers in Michigan and in all right-to-work states can still bargain over wages, hours, working conditions and anything they could bargain for before right-to-work. “

Vernuccio continued: “Besides higher wage growth, higher population growth, and when cost of living is factored in workers earning more, right-to-work also makes unions stronger. Right-to-work means that unions must prove their worth to their members and put their members’ needs above the special interests. It is for this reason and the fact that there are more jobs are going to right-to-work states that unions in those states are growing.”

RTW states enjoy increased real personal e growth, population growth and employment growth, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute study, which concluded “the overall effect of a RTW law is to increase economic growth rates by 11.5 percentage points” and calculated loss of potential e in non-RTW states between 1977 and 2012 at a median $3,278 per capita, or nearly $13,000 annually per family of four.

According to the Mackinac Center’s analysis of the CEI study:

The study highlights some additional statistics that suggest RTW laws have a positive impact on economic growth. For instance, real personal e in RTW states grew by 165 percent from 1977 to 2012, but only by 99 percent in states without such laws. Measured by per-capita e, states with RTW laws grew by 65 percent, whereas non-RTW states grew by only 50 percent.

Generalizing about the millions of interactions and factors that impact a state’s economy is tricky, and one should always use caution. But a growing amount of evidence suggests that states with RTW laws, by lowering the actual, perceived or future cost of doing business, attract more capital, firms and workers. Eventually these factors add up and contribute to a growing state economy, just as general economic theory would predict.

The benefits won for workers from their respective unions in the past and from RTW legislation in the present are indisputable. As noted by Acton’s Jordan Ballor:

The key here is to understand that where union membership pulsory and the unions themselves are supported by government subsidy, the rightful purpose of labor unions as recognized in Christian social thought (to protect the welfare of the workers and in so doing promote mon good) is undermined. Voluntary associations, including voluntary and free labor unions, have a critical role to play in a flourishing society. But under a mandatory system, where labor unions are free petition and loss of potential members, it es too easy to subsume the promotion of worker welfare under the promotion of the welfare of the union itself. And in turn labor unions are free to promote partisan causes to an effectively captive audience and underwrite explicitly partisan political advertising. This kind of crony unionism, in which the government sanctions and promotes pulsory union monopoly in exchange for political support, perverts both the government and the unions. Each institution has a positive role in promoting mon good, but when such economic and political interests are so intimately aligned, self-interest is substituted for mon good.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Hobby Lobby Reaction Speaks to Future of Religious Liberty
Regarding the Hobby Lobby decision and the Supreme Court, I believe the National Review editors summed it up best: “That this increase in freedom makes some people so very upset tells us more about them than about the Court’s ruling.” I address this rapid politicization and misunderstanding of religious liberty and natural rights in today’s mentary. The vitriolic reaction to the ruling is obviously not a good sign for religious liberty and we’re almost certainly going to continue down the...
Audio & Video: Sirico on the Hobby Lobby Decision
Acton Institute President and Co-Founder Rev. Robert A. Sirico had a busy media day yesterday in the wake of the release of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby vs. Sebelius case. using the audio player below, you can listen to an interview with Rev. Sirico on The Michael Berry Show on Houston’s 740 AM KTRH radio where the impact of the decision is examined. Additionally, beyond the jump I’ve embedded Rev. Sirico’s appearance on Bloomberg TV’sStreet Smart with...
China’s One-Child Policy Creates Human Trafficking Plights
China’s one-child policy and a cultural preference for boys means that the world’s most populous country has a severe shortage of women. That means a severe shortage of brides. And that means a human trafficking crisis. Kiab, a Vietnamese girl who had just turned 16, was told by her brother that he was taking her to a party. Instead, he sold her as a bride to a Chinese man. The ethnic Hmong teenager spent nearly a month in China until...
Political Contributions To The Real War On Women
Gender disparity in pay has been discussed ad nauseum, especially given that the facts are that women really don’t get paid less than men, taking into account real life circumstances. But are there factors that hold women back? Women still tend to choose lower-paying jobs, and are more likely to leave the job market than men. Less than 5 percent of our nation’s leading CEOs and corporate leaders are female. What’s behind this? Abby M. McCloskey, program director of economic...
Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places
In the latest video blog fromFor the Life of the World, Evan Koons reads abeautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins over some striking visual imagery. Watch it below: Hopkins begins by highlighting the wondrous and mysterious pulse of nature, moving eventually to the acts of we “mortal things,” prone to appease the self, and bent on crying, “Whát I dó is me: for that I came.” But he doesn’t stop here, for surely man was neither created nor destined to...
Net Neutrality and Religious Advocacy
Yesterday, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) held a Senate hearing on his proposed bill, the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act of 2014. The bill, reading at just four pages, serves as a tool bat “paid prioritization” in the network traffic business in an effort to maintain petition in that market. This idea, known as net neutrality, as explained by Joe Carter, assumes “that a public information network should aspire to treat all content, sites, and platforms equally” as well as...
What You Need To Know About ISIL In Iraq
has an excellent piece on Iraq’s ISIL and the political crisis there. Here are some of the most salient points. ISIL is Al Qaeda’s arm in Syria and Iraq.ISIL began as ISI or “Islamic State in Iraq” and was seeking to regain power for Sunni Muslims. “…“…after U.S. forces left in 2011 the Iraqi government failed to follow U.S. advice to take good care of the Sunni tribes, if only to keep the tribes from again supporting the Islamic terrorist...
Helping The Poor With, Of All Things, Cash
Christopher Blattman, an associate professor at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, thinks giving cash to the poor is a good idea. Not free meals, not tickets to redeem for food, but cash. And it just might work. Blattman writes in The New York Times of the experience of giving cash to the poor. The knee-jerk reaction to this idea is, “Well, they’re just gonna waste it.” But Blattman finds evidence to the contrary. Globally, cash is a major...
American Freedom: Is It Overrated?
We Americans will celebrate 238 years of freedom this Friday. In 1776, the 13 colonies unanimously declared: When in the Course of human events, it es necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare...
The Root of All Freedoms: Kuyper on Freedom of Conscience
The Obama administration’s HHS mandate has led to significant backlash among religious groups, each claiming that certain provisions violate their religious beliefs and freedom of conscience. Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulingwas a victory for such groups, but other disputes are well underway, with many more e. Even among many of our fellow Christians, we see a concerted effort to chase religious belief out of the public square, confining such matters to Sunday mornings, where they can be kept behind closed doors....
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved