Gumbo Politics: Unions, Business, and Louisiana Right-to-Work Legislation

A diffusion model of right-to-work law history in the United States

“…Moore and Newman (1985) point out in their survey that, when correctly modelled, right-to-work legislation appears to have only symbolic effects on unionization (and Right-to-work law history in the USA 97 vice versa), not substantive ones. That appears to be true in all four models of Table 1, contradicting the results of Mixon and Ressler (1993), Canak and Miller (1990) and labour researchers.…”

“…By examining the unionization of local governments, they provide evidence that right-to-work laws do result in diminished unionization. Canak and Miller (1990), using data from the state of Louisiana, provide a historical background of state passage of right-to-work legislation from 1940 through the 1960s. They suggest that community involvement in Louisiana (among workers and management) during the campaign period, as well as interunion conflicts (along with declining unionism), allowed the passage of right-to-work laws.…”

Redefining the right-to-work debate: Unions and the dilemma of free choice

“…Haggard's (1990) bibliography reported that nearly 50 empirical studies of RTW laws were conducted between the late 1950s and 1990. Although the RTW issue has not been as popular in the 1990s as it was in the past, RTW studies have continued to accumulate (Davis and Huston, 1995;Sobel, 1995;Chaison and Dhavale, 1992;Garofalo and Malhotra, 1992;Zax and Ichniowski, 1991;Canak and Miller, 1990). Unfortunately, the two empirical streams of this research barrage have not definitively indicated whether unions are weakened by RTW laws.…”

A Spatial Perspective on Rising Inequality in the United States

“…While globalization has been conspicuously absent in recent sociological research on rising wage inequality in the United States (see Myles and Myers 2007), in part because measures of international trade volume, foreign direct investment, and outsourcing are not highly correlated with inequality trends (Burtless 1995;Lee, Nielsen, and Alderson 2007;Morris and Western 1999), globalization is nonetheless important for understanding earnings restructuring because it contributes to the competitive pressures to which firms respond. Canak and Miller (1990) found that labor costs became the object of U.S. firms' restructuring strategies during the 1970s precisely because, in a period of increasing globalization, they were viewed as one of the few elements of production actually within the firm's control. And while indicators of global capital mobility do not coincide temporally with rising earnings inequality, increasing too late to explain American earnings restructuring, U.S. firms exploited spatial variation within the United States long before the widespread use of offshoring and foreign direct investment.…”