There's been a lot of discussion in the media and among various factions on many sides of the debate sparked by Wisconsin's Governor Walker targeting the ability of public-sector employees to bargain collectively.
One thing I found to be sadly lacking from the debate was actual data showing how labor laws and whether public sector employees and teachers can bargain collectively has a positive, negative or no correlation to various outcomes.
I asked myself questions like: Do states that have laws covering teacher collective bargaining have higher graduation rates? Do states with laws allowing public sector employees to bargain collectively have higher income rates?
Also, how does the "Right to Work" status of a state affect things?
I spent the last three weeks compiling data to answer these questions definitively. Read on to see how I did it and to look at a lot of pretty charts.
The Base Data
There's a lot of sites around that provide one with a lot of information about labor laws. Unfortunately, most of them are either very narrowly focused on one state or region, or on one aspect of labor law. Another problem is that the vast majority of them are highly biased in one way or another.
Luckily for us, there's primary sources, in the form of the laws of each and every state. I compiled a data sheet that was organized like so:
1. Is the state a Right To Work one? (yes or no)
2. Does the state have a law covering collective bargaining for teachers? (yes or no)
3. Does the state allow strikes by teachers? (yes, no, sometimes)
4. Does the state have a law covering collective bargaining for public employees (yes, no, some)
5. Does the state allow strikes by public employees? (yes, no, sometimes)
Some Notes on the Base Data
I compiled this data by literally going row by row, data point by data point, and looking up the actual statute, law, or code for each and every state in the US. A great resource for this search is FindLaw's state laws and codes list and Findlaw's Official State Codes List. The former gives cites for specific criteria, like if a state is "Right to Work" or not, the latter gives links to the actual codes online.
This was not a trivial undertaking. Many states have extraordinarily byzantine laws and they're all organized differently. However, a bit of perseverance and a LOT of coffee later, I was able to compile citations within the laws of each state for each data point, or for the negative case (no law for collective bargaining), the most closely related data in the state codes.
You can see the entire spreadsheet here. Download it here.
Correlated Data
So, there's a lot of things we could look at that relate to this data set. I picked a few that I thought would be interesting to start with.
1. High School Graduation Rates.
2. Median Income.
3. Unemployment Rate.
Sources for the above
1. National Center for Education Statistics (http://www.scribd.com/...)
2. Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/...)
3. United States Census (http://www.census.gov/...)
The Charts
There wouldn't be any point to doing this if I didn't generate some nifty graphs. So here you go. Most of these speak for themselves. I have tried to keep my comments minimal.
High School Graduation Rates, 2007-2008, By State And Teacher Collective Bargaining
Here we have a chart showing the graduation rate for each state expressed as a percentage, sorted from highest to lowest. The "CBA" column indicates if the state has a law covering collective bargaining for teachers.
The percentage column has a salmon background for states without a collective bargaining law, and a blue background for those that do.
Median Income, 2009, By State And Laws Covering Teacher Collective Bargaining
Shows the median income, highest to lowest for 2009, and whether the state allows collective bargaining by teachers.
Unemployment Rate, Dec 2010, By State and Laws Covering Teacher Collective Bargaining
Shows the unemployment rate for Dec 2010 indicating which states have collective bargaining laws for teachers.
High School Graduation Rates, 2007-2008, By State and Right To Work Status
This chart shows a list of all states, their 2007-2008 high school graduation rate, and whether the state is a "Right To Work" state (meaning it prohibits union membership as a condition of employment).
Median Income, 2009, By State and Right To Work Status
This chart shows a list of all states, their median income for 2009, and whether they are "Right To Work" states.
Unemployment Rate, Dec 2010, By State and Right To Work Status
This chart shows each state's unemployment rate from lowest to highest, indicating which states are "Right To Work" states. Note that the unemployment rate tends to be lower in Right To Work states, but that median income is lower also. Also of interest is that states with collective bargaining laws tend to have lower unemployment rates.