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Time for Kentucky to pick sides

By Aaron Morris

During the Civil War, Kentucky was a border state. It finds itself in the same position once again. Only this time, the commonwealth marks the border between the new, vibrant South and the old-economy industrial North.

Our nation’s economy has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. Increasingly, freer markets and worldwide opportunities for trade are providing new products for consumers and new markets for Kentucky’s products and services.

The labor market in the U.S. is changing accordingly. People no longer work in the same job – or even the same career – for their entire working lives. Technology is making manufacturing and agriculture more productive and efficient. As a result, organized labor unions are seeing their memberships plummet with no end in sight¹.

Record numbers of technology and service jobs are being created in the Southeastern states as this region is becoming the new breadbasket of the global economy. New high-tech manufacturing jobs are moving from the formerly industrial North into states like Georgia and Tennessee.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, states like Missouri and Ohio failed to attract large numbers of jobs during the last eight years. By contrast, Georgia and Tennessee recorded substantially larger increases in the number of new opportunities to employ its citizens.

The defining difference between the job opportunities in these two groups of states is rooted in their labor policies. States experiencing higher levels of job growth are right-to-work states. Kentucky is not one of those.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment gains in right-to-work states far outpace those that steadfastly cling to old economy habits. The five “green” states that embrace right-to-work policies and that often compete with Kentucky for new jobs averaged nearly 287,000 new ones between 1996 and 2004. However, the five “red” states that cling to coercive unionism averaged just more than 63,000 jobs during the same time frame.

That Kentucky added only 83,477 new jobs during this same time indicates our state’s allegiance with that old guard². It is now time for Kentuckians to embrace the labor ethic of their Southern brethren.

Right-to-work laws make it illegal to force employees to join a union as a condition of employment. In right-to-work states, employees make their own decisions about whether to join a union, pay its dues and be covered by its collective bargaining agreement.

Kentuckians have a choice. We can make the single change necessary to join the new, productive and vibrant South; or we can cling to the old ways and be left behind with the rust-belt mentality that holds back the North.

– Aaron Morris is fiscal policy analyst for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

Sources:

1.  Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

2.  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Local Area Unemployment Statistics at http://www.bls.gov/lau/home.htm

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The Bluegrass Institute is an independent research and educational institution offering free-market solutions to Kentucky's most pressing problems.

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