The Politics of Labor-Management Relations: Detecting the Conditions that Affect Changes in Right-to-Work Laws

To contain the costs of conflicts between labor and management, governments in the advanced democracies have adopted far-reaching provisions that regulate labor-management disputes. This close control means that the legal climate is an important determinant of victory in these struggles, but there is almost no statistical research on the recent politics of labor-management relations despite the theoretical importance of this issue. To begin to fill this void, this study uses a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis that detects the conditions that best explain the presence of right-to-work laws in U.S. states since 1960. Non contingent findings suggest that racial divisions and small business dominance increase the probability that the legal context will favor management instead of labor. Historically contingent results suggest that an accord between labor and large firms that broke down after the early 1970s also influenced these perennial political struggles.