We have long expressed the opinion that Nebraska is fortunate to be among the 27 states in the nation that have enacted right-to-work protections for employees. Now there’s new data to reinforce that opinion.
For many years, statistics from the Internal Revenue Service have shown how California, New York and Illinois are paying a high price for not being among right-to-work states. Because of that, they are among the states that allow labor unions to have inordinate amount of influence in the workplace, especially by forcing individuals in some workplaces to pay union dues.
Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-dues states than moving into them. The cumulative net losses in taxpayers and their income have been cutting into these states’ revenue bases, according to Stan Greer, a senior associate for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research.
The latest taxpayer migration data furnished by the IRS showed that the 23 states then lacking right-to-work laws — laws that ban forced union fees as a job condition — lost a total of $40 billion in adjusted gross income due to the net outmigration of taxpayers occurring in the single year before they filed thei...