Negative Employment Growth Since November 2001

### High-Unionization States Are Suffering a ‘Lost Decade,’ But, Even With Recent Setbacks, Low-Unionization States Have Gained Nearly 1.5 Million Private-Sector Jobs Since Last Recession

Early this month, BusinessWeek Economics Editor Michael Mandel bemoaned the fact that U.S. private-sector employment is currently lower than it was in the trough of the last nationwide recession. Citing preliminary August 2009 data for the nation as a whole, Dr. Mandel wrote:

[W]e are down 839K private jobs compared to the previous trough in November 2001. The only other negative trough-trough case was July 1980 to November 1982 – and many economists treat the 1980 and 1981-82 recessions as a single downturn.

Dr. Mandel and the numerous other economic pundits and economists who have since cited his September 4 blog post on “America’s lost decade for jobs†are calling attention to an important trend, but not the one that the media savvy Harvard-trained economist seems to think he is describing.

A closer look at the data cited by Dr. Mandel shows that, although he treats the U.S. as a monolith, just 22 of the 50 states actually have negative private-sector job growth since November 2001. Furthermore, a review of the state-by-state job data alongside state private-sector unionization data suggests that pro-monopoly labor policy, a factor not mentioned at all by Dr. Mandel, may be the principal reason why the job market has been so bad in nearly half the states.

U.S. public policy generally opposes monopolies, or at the very least purports to do so. But federal labor law and the labor laws of most states actually encourage union monopoly control over employees. This fact sheet focuses on federal labor law, which targets the overwhelming majority of private-sector employees and businesses across the country.

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