Right-to-Work laws protect employees from being fired or denied a job merely because they refuse to pay dues or fees to an unwanted union. Indiana is poised to become the nation’s 23rd right-to-work state — and it comes just in the nick of time.
You see, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, Indiana suffered a 9.3 percent decline in its private-sector payroll employment over the past 10 years. Only two other Midwestern states, Michigan and Ohio, fared worse.
As a group, the seven Midwestern states without a right-to-work law experienced an aggregate private-sector job loss of 9 percent. Meanwhile, private-sector employment in the Midwestern right-to-work states as a group actually increased by 0.3 percent.
The fact that right-to-work states located in the same region of the country as Indiana have had a large private-sector-payroll job-growth advantage over the Hoosier State is beyond dispute.
And it’s one reason among many why more and more Indianans are becoming actively involved in the movement to make Indiana America’s newest right-to-work state.
Yet, sadly a number of forced-unionism partisans have recently resorted to flat-out falsifications as they seek to derail right-to-work in Indiana.
Perhaps the most egregious case is Gordon Lafer, a research associate for the Economic Policy Institute. The EPI is a putatively “scholarly” union front organization based in Washington, D.C.
Lafer recently issued an EPI briefing paper opposing enactment of a right-to-work law in Indiana.
Lafer’s anti-right-to-work stance is hardly surprising. He is after all, a former organizer for several unions, and top union bosses funnel millions of dollars from their forced dues-funded treasuries into the EPI every year.
But his disregard for simple facts is appalling, especially for an acid-penned academic who often berates opponents for their supposedly poor “scholarship.”
In his hit piece, Lafer asserts that the higher average private-sector job growth of Midwestern right-to-work states relative to Indiana over the past decade is “due entirely to North Dakota, whose growth was sped up by the discovery of oil, which has nothing to do” with the Roughrider State’s right-to-work law.
This isn’t remotely correct. Without North Dakota, Midwestern right-to-work states’ aggregate private-sector employment from 2000 to 2010 fell by 0.8 percent, a decline barely one-12th as severe as Indiana’s.
Midwestern right-to-work states, minus North Dakota, still reaped a private-sector job increase of 25 percent, more than two-and-a-half times as great as Indiana’s 9.7 percent.
Besides grossly misrepresenting the Labor Department’s state data on all private-sector jobs, Lafer’s recent briefing paper uses cherry-picked data to create an impression that Indiana is outpacing Midwestern right-to-work states in manufacturing job creation.
Over any substantial period of time, this is false. From 2000 to 2010, for example, manufacturing employment in Indiana plummeted by 32.9 percent, a decline more than half as steep as the one experienced by Midwestern right-to-work states.
Lafer may not like it, but the actual 10-year data show large growth advantages for Midwestern right-to-work states in private-sector employment, manufacturing employment, and real private-sector compensation (an aggregate 11.5 percent gain vs. Indiana’s 4 percent decline).
The professor is entitled to his opinions, but not to his own facts. Indiana’s workers and citizens should be applauded for seeing past the falsehoods and supporting a right-to-work law that greatly expands the freedom for workers to choose whether or not to affiliate with a union.
Stan Greer is an editor at the National Right-to-Work Committee.
