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Dayton
Daily News...
Kasich firm on union
bargaining changes
If lawmakers don’t come up with collective bargaining bill he likes,
he’ll put his in budget.
By Laura A. Bischoff, Columbus Bureau, February 11, 2011
COLUMBUS — If lawmakers don’t pass a collective bargaining bill that he
likes, Gov. John Kasich on Thursday said he is prepared to wrap his own
reforms into his budget bill next month.
Kasich said his own bill would outlaw strikes by public employees and
penalize those who walk off the job by firing them or docking their pay.
The governor also noted that he wants fact-finding reports produced
during contract negotiations open to the public so taxpayers know the
details.
“We have got to restore balance (between labor and management,)” Kasich
said.
Asked what recourse public union workers would have under his proposal,
Kasich said, “They have a job. They should continue to negotiate and
try to come up with something.”
On Wednesday, the first hearing was held on a bill to prohibit
collective bargaining for the state government’s 40,000 workers, weaken
binding arbitration for police officers and firefighters, ban public
employee strikes, limit local unions’ right to bargain for health
insurance, eliminate automatic step increases, and remove teachers’
right to pick their classes or schools.
The bill was introduced by state Sen. Shannon Jones, R-Clearcreek Twp.
Kasich declined to comment on Jones’ bill on Thursday.
Kasich said he will watch Jones’ bill go through the process, “and if
it doesn’t come out the way that I like it — and that’s fine, you have
to let the legislature do their job — I’ll have it in the budget.”
Kasich also told the Ohio Newspaper Association that he wants to
eliminate the law requiring union-scale wages, the so-called prevailing
wage, to be paid in public construction projects.
Jeffrey Keefe, associate professor of labor and employment relations at
Rutgers University, recently completed a study of public-worker
compensation in Ohio and found that hourly wages of state and local
workers are 3.3 percent lower than those of comparable private-sector
employees.
“State and local government employees in Ohio are not overcompensated,”
Keefe said. “If anything, they’re undercompensated, but basically what
I see is that they’re equitably compensated.”
The second hearing on the Senate bill is Tuesday.
Read it in the Dayton Daily News
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