The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #94278 Message #1823219
Posted By: Old Guy
30-Aug-06 - 11:42 PM
Thread Name: BS: Right to Workgate
Subject: BS: Right to Workgate
It has come to my attention that some people are attacking the Right to work law and trying to portray it as a bad thing.
What the law does is it gives the worker the right to decide if they want to pay wages to a trade union or not.
It seems like a civil right to me and if a trade union forces one to pay for something they don't want, it is a violation of civil rights.
...Between 1970 and 2000 non-right-to-work states lost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs. Michigan alone shedded 100,000 jobs. But right-to-work states over the same period gained 1.4 million manufacturing jobs.
Part of the reason for this is the fact that right-to-work states have http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=5937lower labor costs — the average right-to-work state has nearly 5 percent lower per-unit labor costs than the average state without a right-to-work law. But this doesn't mean such laws penalize workers in order to benefit employers.
In fact, workers themselves benefit from right-to-work laws. New jobs mean more demand for labor, which nudges wages higher. And when the cost of living in right-to-work states vs. non-right-to-work states is taken into account, workers in right-to-work states are the winners.
In fact, George Mason University economist James Bennett found in 1994 that after adjusting for the cost of living and taxes, workers in right-to-work states took home over $2,800 more each year than workers in non-right-to-work states. In 2001 David Kendrick of the National Institute for Labor Relations Research did similar calculations for nine Midwestern states and found that take-home pay was higher under right-to-work laws....