The Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union have split from the AFL-CIO. For the last half century, union membership as a proportion of employment has been falling in the United States. There are lots of reasons for this, but in this short post, I focus on one of them: employment growth and union membership in "Right to Work States."
If a person lives in a Right-to-Work state, that person can work in a unionized establishment without having to join the union (there are some exceptions - railway workers are not covered by these laws). Right to Work states are clustered in the southeast, in the mountain west (Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and Arizona) and in the high plains. Generally speaking, it will be more difficult for unions to do their thing in right to work states and, as a result, it will also be more attractive for firms to do business there.
It's hard to say exactly what the effect of right-to-work laws on union status goes because
right-to-work laws are going to be more prevalent in states where
unions are not highly-regarded. But that's not the point of this post.
I went to unionstats.com and obtained their data on employment and union membership. I calculated union membership as a proportion of employment and year-ago employment growth rates for Right to Work states and Non-Right to Work States from 1983 to 2004.
Not surprisingly, membership rates have been falling in all states but have been lower in the right-to-work states.
And with only a few exceptions, employment growth has been higher in the Right to Work states.
A part of the larger growth in the right-to-work states is due to the lower chance of union activity in those states. Competition between firms pushes them to 1. provide what customers want and 2. do so at the lowest cost. Since, to my knowledge, there is nothing in US labor law that prohibits companies from locating in particular areas, businesses will seek to establish sites in geographic areas where the chances of union activity are smaller. Like I said in an earlier post, while this is bad for those associated with big labor, it's good for the bottom line: no, not that bottom line... the customer.
A big HT to Barry Hirsch and David Macpherson for their unionstats.com site.
Update: John Palmer pointed out that my initial post had the color codes switched around in the legend for the union membership graph. I have fixed the legend and uploaded the correct graph.