Northrop- Grumman announced Tuesday its intent to close New Orleans area Avondale shipyards and consolidate the 5000 jobs into its larger shipyard at Pascagoula Mississippi. Avondale lost a union election in the early 1990's, ultimately the union was certified and the shipyard was acquired by Northrop-Grumman. At the time I remember thinking how this ultimately made Avondale much more vulnerable to closure. Now, by sometime in 2013 Avondale is scheduled to be gone. Non-union status was a valuable protector for this shipyard, but now its just an expendable unionized facility.

We have previously posted, here, here, here, here and here about Canadian data usefulness as a predictor of what EFCA might produce in the United States. The Economic Policy Institute has released data on first contract arbitration in Manitoba, the Province with the most EFCA FCA provisions. The small sample study notes that 87.5% (14 of 16) businesses who engaged in FCA between 2001 and 2007, remain in business. The AFL-CIO blog touts this as "evidence" EFCA is not a jobs killer. That a business remains in business is of course a positive fact, but really provides little proof that the business is no worse off than if it had not been required to submit to an imposed collective bargaining agreement. How successful could the 16 have been without this burden, would the two failed enterprises survived? The news in this piece is not that FCA is good, but rather that it was used only 14 times in 7 years.