NILRR: Workers Increasingly Favor Right to Work States

Source: Florida Daily (9/9/2022)

Union bosses and their apologists often grossly understate, or forget about altogether, regional cost-of-living differences when they are debating living standards in Right to Work states versus in forced-unionism states.

Downplaying or ignoring this key issue makes it easier to hide the economically disastrous effects of compulsory unionism. But no matter how vociferously Big Labor tries to insist that corralling workers into monopolistic unions somehow makes them more prosperous, there is one unimpeachable fact that union spokesmen have extraordinary difficulty explaining away:

When they have a choice, working-age people prefer not to live in forced-unionism states.

Age-grouped state population data for 2020 and 2021 released by the U.S. Census Bureau in June 2022 show an acceleration of a long-term trend of massive exodus of breadwinners and their families out of the 23 states that have yet to adopt and implement a Right to Work law. Such laws bar the termination of an employee for refusal to bankroll a union they don’t want.

The Census data show that, from July 2020 to July 2021 alone, the total population of people in their peak-earning years (aged 35-54) in forced-dues states fell from 41.828 million to 41.673 million. That represents a decline of 155,000, or 0.4 percent. …. (see: Stan Greer Opinion: Workers Increasingly Favor Right to Work States; Stan Greer is a senior research associate at the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy)