How Wisconsin Becoming a Right-to-Work State Will Boost Its Job Growth
Stephen Moore /
(This article was originally published last week, before the Wisconsin state assembly passed right-to-work legislation.)
Wisconsin is poised this week to become the 25th “right-to-work state,” ending forced unionization and allowing individual workers to decide if they want to join a union or not.
The Wisconsin Senate just recently passed right-to-work, and our sources in Madison say that the House, which is controlled by Republicans, will enact a similar law in the days ahead.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a leading presidential candidate, is sure to sign the bill when it gets to his desk. “This isn’t anti-union,” insists Walker. “It restores worker rights and brings jobs back to Wisconsin.”
Some 3,000 liberal protesters stormed the Capitol in Madison over the weekend to reverse the momentum for the new law. This isn’t Walker’s first dust-up with union bosses. Four years ago, nearly 100,000 activists grabbed nationwide headlines when they protested his reforms in Wisconsin’s collective bargaining process with public employee unions.
If the new law passes, Wisconsin would join two other blue-collar, industrial Midwestern states — Michigan and Indiana — to recently adopt right-to-work. “If you had told me five years ago that right-to-work would become law in Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin, I wouldn’t have thought it was even remotely possible,” says economist Arthur Laffer.
Laffer and I have conducted substantial economic research showing three times the pace of jobs gains in right-to-work states than in the states with forced union rules that predominate in deep blue states such as California, New York and Illinois.
In the 2003-2013 period, jobs were up by 8.6 percent in right-to-work states, and up only 3.7 percent in forced union states. Most of the Southern states, with the exception of Kentucky, are right-to-work.
Many auto jobs in recent decades have moved out of Michigan and Ohio and into states such as Texas, Alabama and South Carolina, due in part to right-to-work laws in Dixie.
But as union power recedes in the Midwestern states, many of the region’s governors see factory jobs returning to their backyards. “Right to work is already lowering unemployment in Indiana and causing a manufacturing revival here,” says Gov. Mike Pence.
This jobs story explains why right-to-work activists are confident several other target states — including West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky — are politically on the cusp of going their way. Several local areas in Kentucky are already moving to right-to-work at the county level. The New Hampshire legislature passed right-to-work in 2012, but the law was vetoed by the governor.
Originally published in Investors.com