The 'right-to-work' pay gap

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**Kimberly Adams** (0:31)
How state laws affecting unions can affect your wages even if you're not in a union.
From Marketplace in Washington, I'm Kimberly Adams. We're headed into Labor Day weekend, a celebration of America's labor movement and unions. But only about 10 percent of workers were in unions in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. State laws have a big impact on union membership, as well as worker wages more broadly.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute finds people who live in right-to-work states make nearly 7 percent less on average than people who live in states without right-to-work laws. That wage gap has more than doubled in the last decade. Marketplace's Samantha Fields has more.

**Samantha Fields** (1:16)
26 states have so-called right-to-work laws. Kentucky was the last to pass one in 2017

**Elise Gould** (1:23)
Right-to-work is kind of a misnomer.

**Samantha Fields** (1:25)
Elise Gould at the Economic Policy Institute says these laws do not offer workers any job protections.

**Elise Gould** (1:32)
Instead, what they do is prohibit any requirement that workers covered by a union contract either join the union or contribute toward the cost of union representation.

**Samantha Fields** (1:41)
Which makes unionizing harder.
In states with right-to-work laws, just 6% of workers are in a union versus 16% in states without these laws. And salaries are lower on average, especially for women and black and Hispanic workers, says Kyle Moore at the Century Foundation.

**Kyle Moore** (1:59)
A lot of that comes down to what unions do for folks, right? Black workers often see a greater benefit from having a union than white workers because the private market is often unfair to black workers.

**Samantha Fields** (2:10)
But Gould at EPI says the right-to-work laws themselves are just one factor.

**Elise Gould** (2:15)
Non-right-to-work states are more likely to have higher minimum wages. They're more likely to have restrictions on non-compete agreements or pay transparency policies.

**Samantha Fields** (2:24)
And she says those policies are likely also contributing to higher wages for workers in those states. I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

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**Kimberly Adams** (3:20)
Tomorrow in the much anticipated jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one number to watch is the labor force participation rate. That's the percent of people that could be working who either have jobs or are looking for jobs. And it has dropped in the past few months to its lowest point since the depth of the pandemic. Some people exit the labor force because they want to, but some do it because they have to, which is why we're launching a new series today to tell their stories called Clocked Out.

**Brian O'Connell** (3:51)
My name is Brian O'Connell, and I'm 72 years old. I'm a retired Air Force aviator. I then became an Air Force junior ROTC instructor. So I taught for over eight years, and then my eyesight started going south. I was diagnosed with glaucoma while I was still on active duty in the Air Force. And then about 15 years after I was diagnosed, I had a pressure spike, and that's when I experienced immediate vision loss.
In early 2016, I realized that I didn't think that I was going to be able to continue to teach, so at the end of the school year, I retired. It was very difficult to step away because it was not on my terms. I really enjoyed what I was doing as a teacher. I enjoyed the daily interaction with the students. I enjoyed the extracurricular activities that I was part of. Things were a little dark sometimes, and I started avoiding just being around other people who I knew because I was not able to see their faces, and therefore, I felt uncomfortable. Until one day, my wife was reading a letter to the editor to the local newspaper from the veteran who wrote in about a program the Department of Veterans Affairs offers the VA, called the Blind Rehabilitation Center. It's a service to basically teach veterans how to deal with that technology and orientation and mobility and life skills. I learned a tremendous amount.