Toledo Blade...
Reality Check
Editorial 
September  5, 2011 

For all its noxious features, Senate Bill 5 — Issue 2 on the November ballot — is winning support from Ohio voters who reject the idea that they should pay higher taxes or take cuts in government services so that public employees can maintain pay, benefits, and job security that they don’t get. 

It’s a reasonable argument, but it continues to elude public employee unions that disdain necessary modernization of the 28-year-old state law that defines the collective-bargaining rights of government workers. Hence the dreadful choice before voters this fall: destructive change, or no change at all. 

The most recent example of union denial of economic reality comes courtesy of Local 7 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which represents about 850 non-uniformed City of Toledo workers. This week, local members soundly rejected an independent fact finder’s report in their contract dispute with the city, then marched outside One Government Center to protest their ill treatment. 

What abuses are members of the largest city union, whose average pay is $38,000 a year, expected to endure? A two-year wage freeze (after a 2 percent raise this year). A suggestion that they pay as much as 15 percent of the cost of their health insurance; they now pay 5 percent. A proposal that they pay the full 10 percent share of their own contributions to their pensions; taxpayers now pick up that expense. 

These concessions don’t merit a chorus of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But they might not sound too bad to private-sector workers in Toledo who have endured big cuts in their pay and hours to keep jobs that pay less — assuming they have been lucky enough to avoid getting laid off. 

Many of these workers would welcome the opportunity to pay just 15 percent of their health-insurance costs. And no one subsidizes their pension contributions... 

Read the rest of the editorial at the Toledo Blade