By: DAVID GUTMAN, political reporter • Charleston Gazette-Mail
Just as the West Virginia Legislature began considering “right-to-work” legislation Thursday, a new economic analysis has alleged that the intellectual backbone behind the Republican proposal, a West Virginia University study of the issue, made basic mistakes and “is fraught with several problems.”
In November, the WVU Bureau of Business and Economic Research unveiled a study of right-to-work laws that was requested and funded by the Republican-led Legislature.
The study, analyzing state economic data from 1990 to 2012, found that passing a right-to-work law in West Virginia would lead to faster job growth and a faster-growing economy.
“We established a process to ensure we would have independent, unbiased economic analyses of major initiatives that come before the Legislature,” House Speaker Tim Armstead, R-Kanawaha, said in touting the study. “This study appears to support what we’ve been saying for some time — that a right-to-work law would certainly be advantageous to job growth in our state.”
However, on Thursday, the Economic Policy Institute, a national think tank, released an analysis of the WVU study, saying it made such egregious errors as to “allow serious researchers and conscientious policy makers to disregard their study and results.”
When you fix the errors in the WVU study, the EPI writes, “the relationship between right to work and employment growth disappears.”
The EPI describes itself as a nonpartisan think tank focused on the needs of low- and middle-income workers. It says it gets about one-quarter of its funding from labor unions, which strongly oppose right-to-work laws. Slightly less than one-third of the organization’s board of directors are union-affiliated.
Read more at: WVGazetteMail.com
