Right to Work Means Jobs for NM

The topic of right to work generates much discussion these days about whether it is worthwhile for New Mexico to adopt this type of legislation. Unfortunately, a lot of the dialog misses the point and focuses on the wrong questions.
The reason to adopt right to work is because New Mexico needs jobs – lots of them. We need to pull our population out of poverty. We need to create opportunities that will keep our children in New Mexico.
Jobs and more job opportunities are the best way to accomplish that.
The site selection industry, those people whose job it is to help companies pick new locations, often use right to work as a screening factor for their clients to eliminate locations and to narrow choices. If a state doesn’t check the box that says they are a right-to-work state, an estimated one-third to one-half of relocating or expanding companies simply will not consider that state in their location choices.
New Mexico has a great story to tell, and many companies that have moved here can and do attest to that. However, if they won’t even consider us, we lose the opportunity to tell that story.
We lose jobs.
Right-to-work legislation won’t be the solution to all of our state’s problems. It’s not a silver bullet. A location’s workforce – its quality, cost and availability – is a major factor in a company’s site selection decision.
And, New Mexico needs a deeper, qualified labor pool to be competitive.
On-the-job experience is one of the best ways of improving the quality and availability of the workforce. Were we able to attract more companies, our citizens would be able to find more employment opportunities here in New Mexico versus going out of state.
We want to stress that we do not propose right to work as an anti-union strategy. right to work does not prevent workers from unionizing or joining unions.
What it does do is give the worker the choice of not paying union dues if they do not wish to join the union. In turn, the National Labor Relations Act allows unions to negotiate contracts covering only dues-paying members.
As with any membership organization, unions depend on dues to operate and pursue their goals. Likewise, as with any membership organization, it will be up to unions to demonstrate their value in order to gain and retain members.
In trying to create better opportunities for all New Mexicans, we need an all-out effort to make ourselves as competitive as possible for attracting new jobs. Right to work is only a piece of the solution.
Part of that effort must include fixing our education system. Another part must be improving our tax code.
Similarly, we need robust economic development incentives such as the proposed $50 million Job Creation Fund unanimously endorsed by the bipartisan New Mexico Legislative Jobs Council.
All of these are steps toward attracting more employers to New Mexico, steps to diversifying our economy.
The beauty of right-to-work legislation is that is does not have a cost to taxpayers, does not require any expenditures of our state reserves, or even any part of the state’s annual budget. It is however, another important economic development tool that can bring more potential jobs to our doorstep.
By: Kurt Browning (Albuquerque Journal)
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