Welcome to Indiana, a Right-to-Work State

Since the law was enacted in 2012, the state has gained jobs from nearby union-friendly Ohio

By Todd Nesbit and Michael LaFaive. Excerpts:

"We found that states with right-to-work protections have a higher employment share in certain industries, such as manufacturing and construction, as a percentage of total private employment. Notably, states that have enacted these laws since 2000 have a 20.7% higher manufacturing share than they otherwise would without a right-to-work law."

"we thought evidence of the laws’ impact might first turn up in border counties and in more heavily unionized industries"

"Manufacturing jobs seem to be traveling from non-right-to-work states to those that have adopted those worker protections. In cases where manufacturing employment was unchanged in a region containing states with and without right-to-work laws, the share of it in right-to-work states seems to have increased at the expense of adjacent states without right-to-work laws."

"We found that manufacturing employment as a percentage of total private employment was more than 27% higher than it would have been absent the law."

"Construction, utility and information sectors also showed positive gains as a share of total employment in right-to-work states. In construction, gains from right-to-work protections were largest (14.2%) in states that adopted such a law before 2000 rather than afterward, but in either case they were still higher than in non-right-to-work border counties. Among post-2000-adoption states, bordering counties in non-right-to-work states suffered an 8.7% drop in construction employment as a share of total private employment. (We split our analysis into two time periods because there was a pause in right-to-work adoptions before 2000.)

We recognize that these laws aren’t the only variable affecting changes in employment shares across industries. Our study, however, includes a set of controls designed to isolate the laws’ impact.

Our study indicates that right to work has broad benefits, and states are harming themselves by not adopting these laws."