The Slippery Math of Right-To-Work Advocates
The Slippery Math of Right-To-Work Advocates
By Tamara Kay 5/17/15 at 4:45 PM
A bevy of “right-to-work” bills has been introduced in state legislatures across the United States this year. The legislation has generated intense debate and contention, making headlines across the country. What was most alarming about the parade of bills introduced this year, however, was how their proponents manipulated facts in order to propel them through state legislatures.
As a sociologist who studies unions and someone who relies on good quantitative data, I am bothered most by how the mathematics used to justify these arguments is so deeply flawed—mistakes that any student of statistics could easily spot. Lately I’ve been focusing on the battle over right-to-work legislation in New Mexico, where a bill was dealt a death blow in the state Senate at the final hour.
But workers in other states such as Wisconsin have not fared as well. In March, the Midwestern state became the 25th in the U.S. to prohibit unions from negotiating contracts that require union and nonunion employees to pay their share of costs for all the benefits the union provides.
The results of this war on workers may vary from state to state, but the genesis of these salvos and the misleading arguments used to muscle them through legislatures are the same. A careful analysis reveals their scientific and intellectual flaws.
More:
http://www.newsweek.com/slippery-math-right-work-advocates-332555
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