Harris' Dream for American Workers a Nightmare

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic — and politicians’ ham-fisted response to it — dealt a cruel shock to employees and businesses in early 2020, working-age Americans, in greater numbers than ever before, have been fleeing states where their Right to Work isn’t protected.

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau this summer confirm that the stampede of breadwinners and their families out of Big Labor’s stronghold states continued in 2022 and 2023, when COVID-19-related restrictions on business activities and school lockdowns were already mostly in the past. More than ever before, American employees’ “foot voting” is demonstrating they strongly prefer Right to Work over forced unionism.

Unfortunately, politicians like 2024 Democrat presidential standard-bearer Kamala Harris couldn’t care less about that. There is a huge disconnect between union boss-owned politicians like Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and the majority of Americans who get most of their income from paychecks furnished to them and/or their loved ones by private-sector businesses.

Just as the Biden-Harris administration has done for years, the Harris-Walz ticket is trying to justify its support for legislation corralling millions of additional workers into monopolistic unions by loudly claiming that doing so would somehow make those workers more prosperous.

Ms. Harris, Mr. Walz and their campaign propagandists are trying to bamboozle citizens into believing their claim is correct by grossly understating, or altogether ignoring, the regional cost-of-living difference between Right to Work states and forced-unionism states.

Downplaying or “forgetting” about this key issue enables them to conceal, or so they believe, the proven, economically disastrous effects of compulsory unionism. But the fact is, fewer and fewer Americans are being fooled.

The data show that, when they have a choice, working-age people prefer not to live in forced-unionism states, undoubtedly in part because they understand the fact that real incomes are higher in Right to Work states.

Considered together, Census age-grouped state population data for 2023 and comparable revised data for 2013 tell an important story. They show that, over the past decade, the total population of people in their peak-earning years (aged 35-54) for the 23 states that have never adopted and implemented Right to Work laws (which bar the termination of employees for refusal to pay union dues), fell from 43.66 to 41.62 million. That represents a 2.4% decline.

But in the 24 states that had Right to Work laws on the books the whole decade from 2013-23, there was an overall peak-earning-year population increase of 1.92 million!

And the correlation between forced-unionism status and peak-earning-year population decline is quite robust.

Among the 47 states that didn’t change their Right to Work status between 2013 and 2023, four of the five states suffering the most severe peak-earning-year population losses in percentage terms are forced-unionism. Meanwhile, top-ranking Utah (No. 1), Idaho (No. 2), and Texas (No. 3) are all Right to Work.

Had the peak-earning-year population in the 23 never-Right to Work states risen as much as the national average, they would have had roughly 1.4 million more such residents as of 2023.

And from July 2020 to July 2023, the last three years for which age-grouped population data are available, the trend of “foot voting” against forced unionism by people who have families to support has gotten much stronger.

Census data indicate forced-dues states lost roughly 658,000 “peak earners” to domestic out-migration over this three-year period. If this trend continues, these states are poised to lose another net 2.2 million breadwinners to Right to Work states from 2020 to 2030.

Harris’ radically anti-worker response to this manifest rejection of monopolistic unionism by its putative beneficiaries is to vow that, once she occupies the Oval Office, she will do everything within her power to see that Big Labor’s so-called “PRO Act” (H.R.20/S.567) is rammed through Congress so she can sign it into law.

The core provision in this enormous package of new special privileges for union bosses would effectively render meaningless all 26 Right to Work states currently on the books, and block all states from ever stopping forced financial support for a union as a job condition.

A future without Right to Work protections for private-sector employees anywhere in the U.S. might seem like a dream come true to union bosses. For ordinary Americans, however, it would be a nightmare.