“Right to work” means that employees can’t be forced to join unions even if there is an organized union.  This has the effect of making unions pretty useless.  Right-to-work laws are basically union busting laws in the disguise of “individual freedom”.  It’s no surprise, then, that there is a very high correlation between strongly Republican states and right-to-work states.

This past year, though, there have been a spate of right-to-work laws passed in non-traditional Republican states.  Well, add the strongest union state in the country to the mix.  Michigan just passed their own right-to-work law.  If this keeps up, unions may cease to exist in the next decade.  Anti-union sentiment is strong even with Democrats; just look at Chicago mayor Rahm Emauel.

The sad thing is, everyone understands the anti-union sentiment.  Unions are often horrible.  They take needed money from hard working individuals and that money often seems to be spent filling the coffers of union officials who are all to often corrupt and don’t give much in return back to the workers.  In fact, the only thing that I can think of that is worse than unions is the companies that make unions necessary in the first place.

And that’s the big problem with anti-union sentiment; it’s so short sighted.  Yes, unions are often horrible, but they do serve a purpose that, at the microeconomic level, seems bad for employees, but at the macroeconomic level, provides huge benefits to all employees.  People are very poor long term planners so they tend to see only the microeconomic implication of decisions.  So, down with unions!

Say you are applying for a job at a company in a right-to-work state that currently has a union.  Here is how that job interview would go:

HR person: Do you plan to join the union?

Applicant: Yes.

HR person: Thank you for your time.

Now say you are a current non-union employee at a company in a right-to-work state that decided to join the union.  Here is how that conversation would go:

Employee:  I’d like to join the union.

HR person: You’re fired.

But keep reaching for the sky, America, soon you’ll be the freedomest of all freedomers.  And by “reaching for the sky”, I mean “digging that ditch”.

Life expectancy in the United States has been gradually increasing for decades now.  The average life expectancy is now up to 78.2 years.  There is a common misconception, however, that all have benefited from that increase equally.  This couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The lower half of the economic spectrum has a much lower life expectancy than the top half.

First, though, let me explain that 78.2 life expectancy number.  Every person born is expected to live to the ripe old age of 78.2.  Obviously, not everyone makes it.  That number takes into consideration babies that die at 1 month of age and managers that die of a heart attack at 50.  A lot of the rise in the life expectancy in the United States is really just a drop in the infant mortality rates and better health related outcomes.  This is as it should be, but it can cause confusion in people because your life expectancy at age 65 changes quite a bit from your life expectancy at birth.

Keep that explanation in mind when you read the Social Security Administration’s “Trends in Mortality” study.  There’s a lot of cool stuff in there, but we’re interested in tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 shows that a person in the lower half economic bracket born in 1912 was expected to live to 77 on average whereas one born in 1941 is expected to live to 80. That’s almost a 4% increase.  An upper half person born in 1912 was expected to live to 79 while one born in 1941 is expected to live to 86.  That’s almost a 9% increase.  So the lower half has experienced less than half the life expectancy increases of the upper half.

Table 4 shows the same data in a different way.  It shows how many years left a person has to live at various ages broken down by top and bottom half economic brackets as well as the difference in the number of years left between the two.

The full retirement age is already scheduled to raise to 67 in a few years.  There is lots of talk about raising it even further to solve minor problems that are easily fixable in other ways.  This is an incredibly bad idea.  If it happens, we may actually see the life expectancy of the lower economic half of the population drop as people work themselves to death.