Allen’s blog of trivial stuff

As I did last time, I parked at Prospect Rd. but this time I stayed in Lancaster County.  Just a few steps south of Prospect Rd. is mile marker 4.5.  Went south to 3.5 and back.  Two miles…not too bad for spring training.  I’ve done some of the lower part before I was blogging about this stuff, so I’ll try to blog about the entire length.  Next perhaps I’ll see how the parking at Koser Rd. is, then maybe I can go up to 3.5 where I left off today and back down to Hershey Rd. or 283.

As with the other stretches of this trail, I saw virtually no signs of the history of the area.

Last Tuesday (March 31) there was an “Employee Free Choice Act” forum which was broadcast on PCN earlier today.  A lot of claims were made that probably couldn’t be statistically looked at, but at least one was easy: the claim that people are moving out of states with lots of union jobs into states without them.  Below is a list, combining US census population change between 2007 and 2008 with BLS numbers on percent of union-represented employees.

The 15 states with the smallest population increases (actually decreases for Michigan and Rhode Island) compared with the ranking in percent of union jobs:

Seven of these with the smallest population increase are also within the top 15 with unionized jobs.

The 15 states with the highest population increases compared with their unionized job rankings:

Likewise, seven of these states are within the 15 states with the least percent of unionized jobs.  (There are 51 since DC is included.)

New York has the most unionized jobs at 24.9%, while North Carolina is last with only 3.5%.