Effects of Right to Work Laws on Employees, Unions, and Businesses

Worse than Baumol's disease: The implications of labor productivity, contracting out, and unionization on transit operation costs

“…Finally, we also introduce a binary variable to identify whether the transit agency is located in a state with right-to-work laws (where unionization is not compulsory), and another variable with the average state unionization rate of public sector employees (data from Union Membership and Coverage Database). Based on Cooper (2004), we treat these variables as proxies for union bargaining power and union political power. Finally, we also collect data on state Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the annual average U.S. retail price of diesel fuel from the Energy Information Administration, all in constant dollars.…”