Want to bring back manufacturing?

Just over 10 years ago, the Hoosier State adopted a powerful economic development tool in the form of a right-to-work law. This law simply states that workers need not be required to financially support or join a union to keep their jobs. Scholarship generally shows right-to-work laws are beneficial to workers and to job providers in states that adopt them. Our new research shows this as well.

We have just released the results of a large national study about the employment impacts of right-to-work laws. The study looks at 18 industrial sectors, such as manufacturing, using data about counties. Our interest in this impact stems in part from the rapid adoption of right-to-work laws in several states, starting in 2012, including in our home states of Indiana and Michigan.

In studying the impact of right-to-work, we looked at Indiana and its four neighbors — Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio. We found that manufacturing employment, as a percentage of total private employment, was 27% higher in a given Indiana county than it would have been absent right-to-work.

Even in regions where there was effectively no overall gain in the share of employment, there appears to be a jobs realignment to counties in right-to-work states and away from counties in states without such laws. Manufacturing’s share of employment in Ohio would have been 30% higher in 2018 if it had adopted a right-to-work law. The relative importance of manufacturing’s share...

Read Full Story: https://www.mackinac.org/blog/2022/indiana-works-with-right-to-work