Since January 2015, the Foundation has tracked 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.”
In May, of 21,957 projected jobs, 11,577 — 52.7 percent — were slated for right-to-work (RTW) states:
Non-RTW states posted one of their best performances, scoring much higher than usual in job-creation, as well as slightly better in two of the sub-metrics the Foundation scrutinizes:
* Twelve domestic companies based in non-RTW states announced investments in RTW states. Five went the other way.
* RTW prevailed in foreign direct investment, too. Seventeen projects are headed to RTW states, with four to occur in non-RTW states.
* Three relocations will be made from non-RTW to RTW states, with none moving in the other direction.
* In the greenfield-project sub-metric, RTW prevailed, 17-6.
It’s worth noting that a whopping 61.7 percent of job-creation in non-RTW states will result from just four investments: HomeGoods in Ohio, Electric Boat in Connecticut, and Amazon in Massachusetts and Ohio. (Amazon, by itself, accounted for 33.7 percent.)
Since the inception of our analysis, RTW has enjoyed a consistent lead in employment. Three-quarters of job-creation was slated for RTW states:
Marquee RTW investments in May included:
* AllianceBernstein, a “global asset management firm,” will move its headquarters from New York City to Nashville, relocating “1,050 corporate office jobs.”
* Citadel Completions will hire “more than 250 people” for its new “aircraft center dedicated to interior jet modifications and maintenance” at Chennault International Airport in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
* Arconic, “a global technology, engineering and advanced manufacturing leader,” will move its global headquarters (and 50 employees) “from New York City to Fairfax County, Virginia.”
Methodological specifics:
* All job estimates — “up to,” “as many as,” “about” — were taken at face value, for RTW and non-RTW states alike.
* If an announcement did not make an employment projection, efforts were made to obtain an estimate from newspaper articles and/or press releases from additional sources.
* If no job figure could be found anywhere, the project was not counted, whether it was a RTW or non-RTW state.
* Non-border-crossing relocations were not counted, border-crossing relocations were.
