Academic Apologists For Top-Down Organizing Ignore Basic Facts, Twist Logic

Recently, AFL-CIO agents across America have been breathlessly promoting a study of union organizing campaigns issued by the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development.

It’s hard to put a positive spin on Michigan’s economic track record in recent years, or on the state’s prospects for the future assuming no significant change in current policies.

Between 1994 and 2004, Michigan ranked dead last among the 50 states in nonfarm employment growth. The average state enjoyed a percentage job gain more than two-and-a-half times as great as Michigan’s.1

Just in the past three years, the Wolverine State has lost 40,000 young people in the job market due to out-migration to other states, according to David Littmann, senior economist for the Midland, Mich.-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

NILRR research shows that Right to Work states surpass Forced-Unionism States in 14 major economic indicators.

Recently released U.S. Census Bureau data show that, as of 2003, more than two million young people aged 25 to 34 were missing in the 28 states that do not have Right to Work laws barring the exaction of compulsory union dues and fees as a condition of employment.

Banning forced union dues spurs productivity growth and weakens rationale for ‘outsourcing.’ The record indicates that, by adopting national Right to Work legislation that is now pending (as H.R. 500 and S. 370) in both the U.S. House and Senate, Congress would help preserve and create millions of good domestic manufacturing jobs and brighten America’s economic future.

Project labor agreements, or PLAs, have been around since the 1930s. But they have become an increasingly common means for unions to exercise, directly or indirectly, monopoly power over labor markets since the U.S. Supreme Court gave them the green light in 1993 – in a ruling involving another massive Boston project. Less than 15% of America’s private-sector hardhat labor force currently belongs to a union, but PLAs ensure that many of the most lucrative projects are effectively union-only.

On a Saturday edition of CNN’s heavily watched Capital Gang in January 1997, syndicated columnists Robert Novak and Mark Shields, the show’s cohosts, were discussing the biggest political news item of the week: the unexpected conclusion of the race for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee (RNC).

The day before, the 165 RNC members had chosen Colorado GOP Chairman Jim Nicholson to replace retiring RNC Chairman Haley Barbour. The outcome was a bitter disappointment for former New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill, who had emerged in late 1996 as the clear front-runner in the contest. The chief cause of Mr. Merrill’s defeat was

Barry W. Poulson, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Colorado, Boulder

Twenty-two states now have Right to Work laws. In these states employees do not have to financially support a union with monopoly bargaining privileges at their work place in order to keep their jobs. In states that do not have Right to Work laws, an employee of a unionized firm must financially support the union in order to get or keep his or her job. Individual employees in these states are coerced into paying union dues, regardless of whether they desire union representation. Union officials often defend this coercion on

A study prepared for the NILRR
by Carl F. Horowitz