RTW Wins, the Third Month in a Row

The Rio Grande Foundation is tracking 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 announcements made in January and February, 27,389 jobs (80.6 percent) were to be created in right-to-work (RTW) states. Only 6,605 jobs (19.4 percent) were planned for non-RTW states.

In March, the trend continued — and was even more one-sided. Of 14,197 projected new jobs, 91.2 percent were slated for RTW states:

It’s more clear than ever that in rejecting right-to-work legislation, New Mexico’s lawmakers declined to implement a powerful economic-development tool.

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 by elected officials and economic-development bureaucracies.

* If no job figure could be found anywhere, the project was not counted, whether it was a RTW or non-RTW state.

* Intrastate relocations were not counted, interstate relocations were.