Ten years ago, our home states of Michigan and Indiana adopted right-to-work statutes. These laws state that no worker as a condition of employment needs to join nor financially support a union. In addition to providing workers greater freedom, scholarly research suggested that right-to-work laws are powerful economic development tools. Our new study lends credence to those conclusions.
Our desire to measure the initial economic impacts from right-to-work adoptions led us to examine changes in employment shares in industries such as manufacturing — among others — at the county level, across the nation and during two time periods. We also zeroed in on the impact of right-to-work’s adoption for Michigan, Indiana and the state borders they touch.
We found that in 2018 the manufacturing employment share was almost 21 percent higher in the border counties of states that adopted right-to-work laws after the year 2000 than they would have been without them. They were 31.5 percent higher in interior, right-to-work counties. This finding is particularly impressive when you consider that five of those six states adopted their laws only recently. In other words, the full economic impact of the laws’ adoptions has yet to unfold.
Our study also found that manufacturing’s share of employment in Indiana and Michigan were up 27.3 percent and 26.1 percent, respectively, though in the latter case data availability may have limited the statistical strength of the finding. One unambiguous...
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