Employee Freedom — Good for the Economy, Too

As we continue to celebrate National Employee Freedom Week, it’s important to note the economic performance of states that empower workers, not union bosses.

On January 1, the Foundation began to track announcements of expansions, relocations, and greenfield investments published on Area Development‘s website. Founded in 1965, the publication “is considered the leading executive magazine covering corporate site selection and relocation. … Area Development is published quarterly and has 60,000 mailed copies.” In an explanation to the Foundation, its editor wrote that items for Area Development‘s announcements listing are “culled from RSS feeds and press releases that are emailed to us from various sources, including economic development organizations, PR agencies, businesses, etc. We usually highlight ones that represent large numbers of new jobs and/or investment in industrial projects.”

The Foundation will soon release the results of an analysis of six months of Area Development announcements, comparing right-to-work (RTW) states and compulsory-unionism states. For now, here’s a fascinating finding on what we’re calling the “border-crossing phenomenon”: the incidence of firms based in non-RTW states making investments in RTW states, and vice versa.

In each of the six months, RTW states grabbed the lion’s share of jobs to be created by border-crossing companies:

Employee freedom, real economic development. The correlation is strong.