Labor union activists often push back against right-to-work laws with the quip, “Right-to-work for less.” Their claim that right-to-work lowers wages has made many state legislators hesitant to vote for the anti-union laws. But new research from the conservative Heritage Foundation counters the claim that right-to-work decreases wages.
Right-to-work laws prohibit an employer from forcing employees to join a union or pay union dues.
“When living costs are fully taken into account, private-sector workers in RTW states enjoy real wages equivalent to those in non-RTW states,” Heritage Research Fellow James Sherk writes in an issue brief published Tuesday. “Policymakers considering RTW legislation may do so confident that it will have no negative impact on private-sector wages.”
A surface-level analysis may make it seem as if right-to-work leads to lower wages. States with right-to-work laws do have lower wages than non-right-to-work states, but right-to-work states also have lower costs of living. Virginia is the only right-to-work state with a higher cost of living than the national average.
After adjusting for differences in costs of living, private sector wages in right-to-work states and non-right-to-work states are virtually equal, according to Sherk’s analysis.
The only people who might lose out from right-to-work are public sector workers. “RTW laws do appear to slightly reduce the pay of government employees, easing constraints on hard-pressed state budgets,” Sherk writes. While some government workers might have lower wages, taxpayers across the board would benefit.
Sherk’s analysis was a direct response to an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute claiming that right-to-work lowers wages. More than one-quarter of EPI’s funding comes from labor unions.
Wisconsin State Senator Chris Kapenga, a Republican, was on hand Tuesday at a Heritage event about Sherk’s issue brief. Kapenga authored Wisconsin’s right-to-work law, the 25th and most recent state to implement right-to-work. He discussed the motivation behind Wisconsin’s right-to-work law, saying, “Over 70 percent of our budget really relates to dependency on government versus dependency on the individual. So we knew that we had to take care of this issue.”
Mackinac Center Director of Labor Policy Vincent Vernuccio was also at the event. Vernuccio explained right-to-work as, “Right-to-work simply means a union can’t get a worker fired for not paying them. It doesn’t affect collective bargaining in any other way. Workers, unions, they can still negotiate with their employer over wages, hours, working conditions. Anything they could negotiate over before right-to-work they can negotiate over after right-to-work.”
