Right to work? Workers vote with their feet

Glenn Garvin, Miami Herald Online, explains why labor-backed politicians and Big Labor won’t succeed in destroying Michigan’s Right to Work Law: 

Labor unions and their political buddies have sworn that they will roll back the right-to-work law passed by the Michigan Legislature earlier this month.

But to win the right to work battle, the union forces really will have to shed blood, or at the very least impersonate the old communist regime in East Germany, building walls around their states and topping them with barbed wire to keep people in. Because Americans have been for a long time now voting with their feet in favor of right-to-work laws.

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, between 2000 and 2009, more than five million people moved into states with right-to-work laws from those that don’t have them. Of the 22 states with right-to-work protection during that period (Indiana and Michigan have since joined them), 73 percent gained population from inter-U.S. migration. The only one to lose significant numbers of people was Louisiana, devastated by Hurricane Katrina.