Chart of the Day

Back in April, President Obama's National Labor Relations Board sued Boeing seeking to prevent the opening of a second aircraft assembly plant in South Carolina, a right to work state. MaxedOutMama correctly concluded that an NLRB victory would kill job creation.

Some evidence that right to work is an "under-appreciated fault line[]" in our economy, from Investor's Business Daily:


source: IBD

Now, correlation isn't causation. But, from the same article:

The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%. In right-to-work states the average is 7.9% -- 8.6% adjusted for population.

Between 1977-08, employment grew 100% in right-to-work states vs. the national average of 71% and 56.5% in non-right-to-work states. That's according to a January study that Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder did for the Indiana Chamber of Commerce.

In this period, real per capita income in the right-to-work states grew 62.3% vs. the national average of 54.7% and 52.8% for non-right-to-work states.

Vedder has studied right-to-work laws for decades and argues that this success is not a coincidence.

"I've been looking for ways to show that these laws don't really (impact) anything. But I haven't found it yet," Vedder said.

Right to work opponents claim that right to work laws depress worker wages and benefits. But right to work states have greater in-migration, better work forces, and higher wage rate increases after adopting the law. And ending forced unionization actually can reduce costs of providing worker benefits.

Union advocates label right to work as anti-worker and an attempt to "gut" unions. As a reminder, right to work laws don't ban unions--they just forbid compelling workers to pay union dues as a condition of employment. So much for lefties being "pro-choice". And another example of President Obama's willingness to sacrifice job growth to reward his campaign donors.