Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Vote ‘no’ on Issue 2 to repeal Senate Bill 5: Harriet Applegate
By Harriet Applegate  
October 24, 2011 

In its endorsement of Issue 2 last Sunday, The Plain Dealer repeats in drumbeat fashion that the status quo is unsustainable, referring directly to its assertion that the unions have too much power, and indirectly to the budget shortfall. There are two problems with this: First, the assertion that unions currently have too much power is not borne out by the evidence; second, there is no relationship between the budget problem and the collective bargaining process. And, incidentally, passing this law will not raise one penny of revenue for Ohio. 

It is not the unions that are out of control; it is the governor and the legislature. They are setting a course that is both dangerous and destructive. The bus which the governor exhorts us to get on is not only running over too many of us, it is careening off the road over the cliff. 

Yes, we have a budget problem, but it was not caused by the hardworking people who work in the public sector. It was caused by people just like John Kasich: the Wall Street bandits who gave themselves record bonuses in the very same year the taxpayers bailed them out, making ill-gotten billions on toxic loans which in turn caused millions of Americans to lose their homes. 

Yes, we have a budget problem, but that is because we do not take in enough revenue to run the state. Gov. Kasich and the Republican majority in the Statehouse never even considered raising revenue, even through the relatively easy mechanism of closing outdated and egregious tax loopholes. How responsible is that? Instead, Kasich and the disingenuous Building a Better Ohio have focused on public employees (average pension for a city worker, who earns no Social Security: $19,000) and lied about public employees’ role in the state budget crisis. A recently published independent study (pdf) shows that public employees sacrificed more than $1 billion over the last three years, money which went back into the state coffers. This is testament to the great success of the collective bargaining process. 

Telling Ohioans that public employees -- who are in the middle class by virtue of their decent wages and benefits -- are the problem and consequently have to pay for a crisis that is not of their making is deceitful and wrong. 

Worse, it is destructive because it will further erode our economy. It is the hardworking middle class who, unlike the wealthy, fuel the economy by spending most of their incomes each paycheck. When there are fewer of them with less money to spend, our communities will suffer twice. Not only will there be fewer services delivered by fewer public employees, but local economies will suffer more revenue losses because public employees won’t have the middle-class incomes to pump into the economy. 

The Plain Dealer editorial makes reference to the importance of unions and the necessity of a balance of power between labor and management. If this law were to go into effect, unions would be emasculated to the point of irrelevance. They would not be able to fight for their members and consequently not be able to perform The Plain Dealer’s vaunted balance function. 

Workers would lose their voice because all the real power would now lie in the hands of employers. 

Moreover, The Plain Dealer is dead wrong in its proclamation that currently the balance is “tipped in favor of unions.” Any member of any negotiating team -- on either side -- can attest to that. When you look at the statistics on binding arbitration, you see unions winning almost half and employers winning a little more than half of the disputes that go to arbitration. The work of the state and its cities has been uninterrupted by strikes -- which were numerous before we had collective bargaining. And why were there so many strikes before collective bargaining? They were the spilling-over of pent-up frustration at an unfair, one-sided system. 

Kasich wants to take away the power of the unions to collectively bargain and then turn around and make strikes illegal! He can’t have it both ways. It just won’t work. 

This is just one of many examples of how Kasich adds insult to injury. His rash attack on the middle class will not only take us back to the chaotic old days before the collective bargaining law of 1983, but will harm every Ohioan, whether rich, poor or middle class. 

Harriet Applegate is the top officer of the Northshore AFL-CIO. 

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