You have clear evidence in the table below that allowing workers to choose whether or not to join a union really does matter.
Take a look at the 10-year trend of workers in their peak earning years leaving New England—a region with forced unionism.
Workers simply don’t want to be forced to pay dues to fund efforts by the unions which they don’t support. Whether that be political speech or contract negotiations that could put the corporations employing the union members in jeopardy. The National Right to Work Committee explains the correlation between forced unionism and population decline, writing:
Considered together, age-grouped state population data for 2017 released by the U.S. Census Bureau in late June and comparable data for 2007 tell an important story.
They show that, over the past decade, the total population of people in their peak-earning years (aged 35-54) for the 22 states that have yet to adopt a Right to Work law barring the termination of employees for refusal to bankroll an unwanted union fell from 43.34 million to 40.19 million.
That represents a decline of roughly 3.2 million, or 7.4%.
Nationwide, the peak-earning-year population fell by 4.3% from 2007 to 2017, but in the 22 states that had Right to Work laws on the books the whole time, there was no overall net decline at all.
And the correlation between forced-unionism status and peak-earning-year population decline is quite robust.
Among the 44 states that were either Right to Work or forced-unionism for the whole period from 2007 to 2017, the 10 states experiencing the most severe peak-earning-year losses are all forced-unionism. (See the chart on this page for additional information.)
Fifteen of the 17 bottom-ranking states are non-Right to Work.
Had the decline in the 22 states that still don’t have Right to Work statutes today been only as severe as the national average, they would have had roughly 1.3 million more residents in their peak-earning years as of 2017.
Read more here.
