Source: Colin Gordon, Dissent blog, May 10, 2016
….This cascade of disadvantage for workers in RTW states, from lower unionization rates to lesser bargaining power to lower wages, is illustrated in the two graphs below. In these visualizations of the data, the states are strung like pearls along each annual measure. The RTW states are red, the others blue. The “box-and-whisker” for each year traces the variability across the states: the centerpoint of each box is the median state on that measure; the top and bottom of the box mark off the seventy-fifth and twenty-fifth percentiles (the “interquartile range”); the top and bottom whiskers reach out to values that are no more than 1.5 times the interquartile range; outliers in the data fall beyond the whiskers… In the graph of union density, unsurprisingly, RTW states cluster below the median. …. On wages, we see much the same pattern: a wide variation across states, the RTW states dripping off the bottom of the scale. The distinction between RTW states and the rest is perhaps most pronounced for men and women at the median, sixtieth and seventieth wage percentiles (a wage range, in 2015 dollars, that runs from about $15/hour to $30/hour). I make no claim here that RTW alone is dampening wages (this is a crude measure that does not control for other economic and policy differences across states). But it is clear, I think, that RTW is a potent marker of the broader climate that workers face in a state. Anti-labor legislation, in most of these settings, is accompanied by regressive and austere fiscal regimes, by woeful underinvestment in education, and by social policies that combine meager cash assistance with generous subsidies or incentives for participation in the low-wage labor market. This, in the end, is not about “rights” at all; it’s about power—the diminished power of unions to represent their members and bargain for living wages, and the naked power of business interests to turn states into laboratories of austerity and neoliberalism. ….