Does ‘Right to Work’ create jobs?
Written by Gordon Lafer, Ph.D. and Sylvia Allegretto, Ph.D.
Corporate lobbyists across the country have urged state legislators to adopt so-called “right to work” laws based on the promise that, by weakening unions and lowering wage standards, such laws will attract outside investment and create more jobs for the states that adopt them.
This is the premier study that refutes this argument, drawing on the case of Oklahoma – which adopted a “right to work” law in 2001 whose impacts can be measured over the succeeding years. “Right to work” laws require that unions provide all their contractual benefits for free to any employee in a workplace, but bans unions from requiring that employees pay their fair share of the cost of negotiating and enforcing those contracts. Inevitably, such laws encourage workers to stop paying union dues, which in turns weakens the union’s ability to negotiate higher wages. As wages decline, corporate lobbyists argue, the state becomes more attractive to outside investors. But in this report, the most rigorous economic analysis shows that while such laws do succeed in driving down wages and benefits – for both union and non-union workers alike – they do nothing to increase employment.