Ohio to Vote on Repealing Laws that Effectively Ends Public Employee Unions

An Early Harbinger of Things to Come in Ohio

After electing a strong Conservative Governor and Republican legislature, Ohio passed a law that severely curtained the rights of public employees to engage in collective bargaining.  The main provisions of the law were that

Ohio’s law allows only limited bargaining: If management and union do not reach a settlement, then city councils and school boards can impose their side’s final contract offer unilaterally. The Ohio law bans binding arbitration and bargaining on health coverage, pensions or staffing levels. It also requires government workers to pay at least 15 percent of their health insurance costs and pay 10 percent of their salaries toward their pensions.



Andrew Spear for The New York Times

Zak Kozberg of We Are Ohio made calls

urging people to support repeal.



Pro public employee union voters in Ohio have managed to get the issue on the ballot, and in November citizens will vote on whether or not to repeal the law.

The requirement that public employees pay 15 percent of health insurance costs should not be controversial, employees in the private sector pay far more, and the requiring a contribution of 10% towards retirement plans also does not seem onerous.  But restricting collective by letting the employers impost a contract offer unilaterally seems completely outrageous, it in effects destroys the public employee unions in an indirect manner.  One wonders why Ohio just didn’t ban collective bargaining altogether.

The rationale behind allowing government to impose a contract is that this is a way to control costs.

 “I want some options besides raising taxes and laying off police and firefighters.” He said government officials often had little recourse but to increase taxes or dismiss public employees, thereby cutting public services, because unions, usually dominated by more senior workers, often refuse to make concessions. Union leaders recognize that concessions would hurt the more senior workers, while in a financial shortfall resulting from unions’ not granting concessions, those laid off would be the more junior workers. Senate Bill 5 allows government to lay off workers outside of seniority.

This is patently ridiculous.  The idea that just because there is collective bargaining means unions can impose their will on government fails to recognize the fact that if government does not want certain things in a contract, it does not have to agree to that contract.  The law recognizes that the problem is not the unions, but the inability of management to bargain for a contract that preserves managerial prerogatives. 

So rather than have effective collective bargaining, Ohio is taking away a basic American right, the right of employees to form unions and bargain over wages, benefits and working conditions.

The contest will be expensive, difficult for both sides and close.  The unions are not doing themselves any favors by running ads claiming that public safety will be imperiled by not having collective bargaining rights. 

A union-backed television commercial shows 3-year-old Zoey Quinn slumped on a Cincinnati firefighter’s arm as he rescued her from her family’s burning house. The advertisement warns that firefighters might not be able to save Zoey next time, because the law bars bargaining over minimum staffing levels.

That sort of campaign is more detrimental to the cause of public employee unions than it is beneficial.  It is condescending to the public and inaccurate.  If they want to win the unions need to be smarter. 

There are national issues here.  Ohio is a swing state, and a loss by the unions will make a loss by Mr. Obama more probably next November.  And while a loss by Mr. Obama in Ohio is not absolutely fatal, it would leave his re-election chances very iffy.