COMMENTARY: Right-to-work states win as trillions have fled union states

By Stan Greer InsideSources.com July 30, 2026 - 9:00 pm For years, IRS data have shown that California, New York and Illinois are paying a steep price for allowing dues‑hungry national leaders to fire workers who refuse to fund their organizations. Year after year, far more taxpayers have left forced‑dues states than moved into them, eroding the tax bases of those jurisdictions. The latest IRS migration figures revealed that the 23 states lacking right‑to‑work laws—statutes that prohibit compulsory union fees as a condition of employment—lost a total of $40 billion in adjusted gross income due to net outmigration of taxpayers in the single year before they filed 2022 returns. These annual IRS snapshots capture only a sliver of the full story, because they do not track how much departing taxpayers earn after they leave. Consequently, the figures understate the accumulating income losses of forced‑unionism states, and they do so by a substantial margin. As the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a Maryland‑based nonprofit, explains, “income doesn’t frost erstwhile it crosses a authorities line.” For instance, the taxpayers “who moved to Florida successful 2013” did not bring merely one year of earnings each; virtually every one of them also brought “a career, a spending signifier and a taxation footprint that continued generating economical activity, twelvemonth aft year.” To estimate each state’s cumulative net gains or losses of income and population over multi‑year spans, the Committee launched its Vote With Your Feet Project, a data platform. In May, the National Institute for Labor Relations Research gathered migration statistics from that platform to produce a far more accurate picture of the cumulative income losses forced‑unionism states suffer from net domestic outmigration than the IRS alone can show. The Vote With Your Feet Project data indicate that the 23 states without right‑to‑work protections for employees from 2012 through 2023 forfeited $2.05 trillion in cumulative adjusted gross income solely because of taxpayer and dependent outmigration during that eleven‑year span. Nine states—California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania—each lost between $105 million and $660 million in cumulative adjusted gross income. Overall, the 23 states that had right‑to‑work laws on the books from 2012 to 2023 enjoyed a net gain of $2.46 trillion in cumulative adjusted gross income, thanks to taxpayer in‑migration. The six biggest beneficiaries, in rank order, are Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas—all right‑to‑work states. As a result of the massive net income loss it experienced from 2012 onward through “foot voting,” forced‑unionism California’s 2023 aggregate adjusted gross income was cut by 11.8 percent, according to the Committee’s estimate. Illinois’ aggregate adjusted gross income was 20.7 percent lower than it would have been, and net taxpayer outmigration trimmed New York’s 2023 total adjusted gross income by 21.1 percent. Cumulative tax‑income losses of this scale make it considerably harder for the taxpayers who remain to cover the costs of state and local government in Big Labor‑dominated jurisdictions. This year, union‑backed politicians in Sacramento, Springfield and Albany are approving further costly taxpayer‑funded handouts for public‑sector unions, all but ensuring that their already strained state finances will face even more severe problems ahead. The remaining taxpayers in these forced‑unionism states will have to bear the burden until they, too, decide to leave. Stan Greer is a senior research fellow for the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.