Right To Work Analysis

Words: 739
Pages: 3

An unnamed author from the Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine believes that the federal and more importantly state governments have assisted in the influx of income inequality through the passage of right-to-work statutes in several states. In 1947, the United States Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act which curtailed many of the powers that labor unions previously held, including prohibiting mass picketing, jurisdictional strikes, and closed shops as well as heavily constraining union shops. One of the most notable (additions) to the (statute) was the capability of the states to enact right-to-work laws. With the right-to-work (laws) in effect, the (ability) to negotiate a union security clause is abolished. The union security …show more content…
To test the validity of this presumption, a table was devised that contained information on the unionization percentage, median weekly earnings, average annual pay, median household income, number of quarterly establishment openings, and poverty rate as of 2009 for every state and also categorized by whether the state is a free-bargaining state or a right-to-work state. The comparisons between the various states do not necessarily agree with the presumptions; on average, the median weekly earnings, average annual pay, and median household income were higher in free-bargaining states than in right-to-work states by 13.4 percent, 14.1 percent, and 13.4 percent, respectively. While the number of quarterly establishment openings is larger for the right-to-work cohort than the free bargaining grouping, with 10.1 to 9.9 openings per 1,000 workers, it is important to note that the average poverty rate for the former, 15 percent, is higher than the latter at 12.8 percent, which can be inferred that the right-to-work laws are not having the positive economic impacts that it suggests. Lastly, the right-to-work states have a unionization rate of 6.6 percent while the free-bargaining states more than double the former with 15.1 percent (cite). From the table, the results look less favorably towards the right-to-work states as the workers there receive less overall compensation than their free-bargaining counterparts along with more poverty. As long as those states have a stranglehold on the union’s ability to function properly and freely, the citizens are not receiving the pay and job security that they should