The Relationship between Union Membership and State Budget Deficits
Contrary to Walker's assertion, there is no direct correlation between public-sector collective bargaining and yawning state budget deficits. According to data gathered by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, while Wisconsin projects a state budget deficit of 12.8 percent for FY 2012, North Carolina, which does not allow government workers to bargain, faces a significantly higher deficit: 20 percent.
That is from Joseph McCartin's piece in The New Republic on the current battle in Wisconsin. I wanted to look at the relationship between unions and deficits more systematically. Like McCartin I used the CBPP data on budget deficits, although I focused not on the projected 2012 deficits but on the 2011 deficits (see Table 4 of the report). I do not know of readily available data on public-sector collective bargaining or on public-sector union strength, so I used the percent of employed people who are members of unions (from this BLS report).
Here is the graph, with a non-linear fit line estimated via lowess.
There is not much of a systematic relationship. The fit line bumps and wiggles but is essentially flat. The bivariate correlation is 0.19, with a p-value of 0.21. Based on