Division of labor: the debate over how to create jobs and support workers continues to split along party lines.

• Author: Fillion, Roger
• Position: LABOR AND EMPLOYMENT

The U.S. economy's less-than-robust recovery from the Great Recession has ignited a scramble among states over how best to create jobs and boost workers' sagging wages. The competition among states has played out in legislatures across the nation. Politics have amplified the situation.

Republicans control both houses of the legislature and the governor's mansion in 22 states. Democrats control them in seven. That split is reflected in debates over right-to-work laws and the minimum wage. Most experts say it's too soon to know how the changes will affect average incomes, productivity, working conditions, state budgets and state economies.

But the politics are clear.

"What we're seeing is a distinction at the state level in state policies," says Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor at the think tank's City Journal, with the Republican and Democratic approaches to labor issues "heading in different directions."

"We're in a period of intense competition for jobs among states because there hasn't been the kind of recovery that provides effusive jobs and tax revenues for everybody," says Malanga. "The Republican states have responded by passing right-to-work laws and the Democratic states have responded by raising the minimum wage."

Recovery from the recession has been slow for the states. "None of the recessions in the past half-century have shown such a slow recovery in overall state tax revenues," a report last June from the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government stated.

"At this point in four previous recoveries, state taxes, adjusted for inflation, were at least 10 percentage points higher relative to the prior peak than they are in this recovery," it said, adding that corporate income taxes remain stuck at 15 percent below the levels before the recession.

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The average American's median income has struggled to recapture the ground it lost since the start of the recession as well. According to Sentier Research, an Annapolis, Md., firm, the median annual household income didn't reach pre-recession levels until November 2015, when it was calculated at $56,746, just $32 over the December 2007 figure.

"The states are really pinched at this point," says Malanga. "There's a very competitive environment for jobs. The Republican states see these labor issues as one way to differentiate themselves from the rest of the country and to lure jobs."

Competing for Jobs

At the center of much of the debate is the role unions play in the job marketplace. Twenty-six states and Guam have passed right-to-work laws that give workers a choice when it comes to union membership--a move that labor leaders charge has zapped the power out of organized labor. Unions can still operate in states with these laws, but workers can no longer be compelled to join as a requirement of their job.

West Virginia became the latest right-to-work state in February, after the Republican-controlled Legislature overrode a veto by Democratic Governor Earl Ray Tomblin. Most of the recent action on right-to-work legislation, however, has focused on the Midwest. Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin have approved right-to-work laws in recent years, even though all three had resisted similar bills in the past. GOP election victories in 2010 made the difference.

In Wisconsin, in 2011, newly elected Governor Scott Walker (R), with Republicans in the majority of both chambers, set the stage for labor law changes by signing a bill that dramatically curtailed collective bargaining for public-sector workers. In 2015, the Legislature passed the nation's 25th state right-to-work law.

"We have been the epicenter for changes related to unions," Wisconsin Senator Scott Fitzgerald (R) says. The Republican majority leader spearheaded passage of the right-to-work law, arguing it would help the state's struggling economy by...