In our ninth installment of The Cato Journal’s January 2010 “Are unions good for America?” issue, we cover the ninth myth. Here is The Homeland Stupidity web site’s synopsis of this myth, and a link to each of the 12 Cato articles.
Myth Number Nine: Right-to-work laws harm employees and prevent employers from freely contracting with unions. Fact: Right-to-work laws improve the economy, and employers freely contracting with unions is prohibited by the Wagner Act. That Act forces employers to bargain with unions “in good faith,” which is interpreted to mean that employers must capitulate to virtually every demand of the unions or be accused of acting in bad faith. This is hardly freedom of contract. Right-to-work laws mitigate, but do not entirely fix, this problem.
I have some experience with this, since I once worked in a non-right-to-work state and was forced to join the union. I would rather have negotiated my own terms; I’d likely have gotten a better deal. It seems many Americans agree, as millions of them have moved from non-right-to-work states to right-to-work states in the last decade, a migration that shows no signs of stopping. Richard Vedder, economics professor at Ohio University, found that both predictive models and real world evidence show that right-to-work states experience more economic growth than non-right-to-work states.
Download the PDF here. Check out the Cato Journal and access all 12 PDFs here.
