The implications of US worker choice laws for British Columbia and Ontario /

The Implications of US Worker Choice Laws for British Columbia and Ontario by Benjamin Zycher, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis September 2013 September 2013 The Implications of US Worker Choice Laws for British Columbia and Ontario Benjamin Zycher, Jason Clemens, and Niels Veldhuis The Implications of US Worker Choice Laws for British Columbia and Ontario / 3 Contents Executive Summary. [...] The standard free-rider problem is likely to increase in importance with the size or diffusion of the group.4 fraserinstitute.org 6 / The Implications of US Worker Choice Laws for British Columbia and Ontario In principle, such policies can be efficient—wealth-enhancing for the economy as a whole—or inefficient, that is, consistent or inconsistent with a strengthening of (regional) competitiveness [...] Accordingly, a free-rider problem attendant upon a state RTW law actually is the result of the NLRA exclusivity provisions rather than the choice of workers to opt out of the formal union bargaining process, an important distinction often obscured in the public discussion.8 In the US, laws governing labour relations in the private sector are largely federal, but states can adopt other rules as lon [...] Section IV applies the experience of the one US state for which the relevant data are available and consistent—Oklahoma—in the context of manufacturing out- put to see if any reasonable hypotheses might be applied to British Columbia and to Ontario in the context of RTW policies.10 Section V offers some brief concluding observations. [...] The majority (the median voter) has incentives to transfer dollars from the collective program to the special-interest program until two dollars of the latter have the same marginal value to members of the majority as one dollar of the former.