The state Senate will make a big decision on Tuesday that will impact millions of workers. They’re expected to approve the repeal of Michigan’s Right to Work law. If passed, repealing the law would make it mandatory for workers to pay dues in unionized shops as a condition of their employment. Experts say the most revealing research compares two counties on state borders, where one county is in a Right to Work state and the other is not.
“Because of the fact that they are so closely related, they tend to have a lot in common other than the fact that you’ve got a change in the Right to Work law,” says Oakland University business professor Michael Greiner. “Again, what those studies tend to find is you tend to have lower union membership in the Right to Work area. Wages, kind of surprisingly, are unaffected generally speaking. And generally speaking, the economic development tends to be a little bit better in the Right to Work area.”
Greiner said much of the research on this topic is politically motivated and therefore hard to decipher.
