It might be self-evident after Tuesday’s election, but I just ran across the interesting chart below which was put together by the Manhattan Institute. It illustrates the relative strength of public-sector labor unions. It will come as no surprise that New Mexico’s public-sector labor unions are the strongest in the region by far and are among the strongest in the nation. To be sure, many of the states with strong public employee unions are also the wealthiest in the nation. They are also the “bluest” (probably a lot of both “cause” and “effect” there) and are generally seeing slow population growth or even loss). This, despite relatively high incomes, makes one wonder why more Americans are moving to middle-income, non-union states rather than high income, heavily unionized states. Lastly, New Mexico is easily the poorest state to have public-sector unions as strong as it does. I can’t get the table to go past Florida, so go to the main paper by clicking here to find it.
