Message to UAW Boss Darin Gilley: Missouri’s Extremely Slow Labor-Force Growth Is a Sign of Economic Weakness, Not Strength
One obvious, but often overlooked, fact about the unemployment trend in any one of the 50 states over time is that it is the result of two key inputs: Â employment growth, and labor-force growth.
In America, people in general, and employees and job seekers specifically, have always been free to move from state to state. Â Consequently, a state may experience negative or extraordinarily slow employment growth over the course of a decade or more, but end up with a seemingly benign unemployment rate relative to other states.
Once a jobless person gives up completely on finding a job in one state and moves to another, her or she no longer counts as one of the “unemployed” in the first state. Â But when any state reduces its official unemployment by this means, it is hardly something local supporters of the economic status quo should brag about!
Forced-unionism Missouri is  a case in point.  From December 2003 through December 2013, according to data collected and published by the U.S. Labor Department, the Show-Me State’s civilian labor force expanded by just 1.0%.  That’s barely more than a quarter as much as the national average of 3.7%, and barely more than one-tenth as much as the 9.7% average gain for the 22 states that had Right to Work laws on the books throughout the last decade.
Missouri’s civilian employment growth over the same 10-year period was a miserable 0.7%, but because so many of its young adults in their career-building years have fled the state since the turn of the millennium, its unemployment rate today looks okay, superficially. Â The fact is, if Missouri’s labor force had grown just as much as the national average since late 2003, and its job growth had held the same, the state’s unemployment rate today would be 8.3% — far above the national average.
Today opponents of grass-roots efforts to make Missouri America’s 25th Right to Work state such as Darin Gilley, president of Local 1760 of the United Auto Workers union, are citing Missouri’s unemployment rate as “evidence” that forced union dues should be perpetuated. Â (See, e.g., the Letter to the Editor penned by Gilley and published in the Washington Missourian January 8 that is linked below.) Â In fact, the statistic favored by Gilley and his ilk shows only that Missouri’s labor-force growth is extremely sluggish — and this is a sign of economic weakness, not strength.
Does UAW Local 1760 chieftain Darin Gilley really think that Missourians should be happy about the fact that, over the past decade, the Show-Me State’s civilian labor force has only grown about one-tenth as much as the Right to Work state average? Image: Still from a YouTube video posted by Bernard Pollack.