Labor & Employment Law

Ohio Workers Determined to Stop Anti-Worker Bill

By James Parks

Several thousand people rallied yesterday outside the Ohio state Capitol.

Ohio?s working people served notice that they are more energized than ever to defeat S.B. 5, Gov. John Kasich?s anti-worker bill that takes away bargaining rights from public employees. The state Senate passed the bill by one vote in a last-minute, dirty-trick maneuver, and the state House began hearings yesterday.

Working families? determination was evident yesterday as thousands of protesters converged on the steps of the state Capitol to protest Kasich?s State of the State address.

Over the weekend, union members hit the streets to educate other Ohio residents about the bill. AFSCME Ohio Council 8, OCSEA/AFSCME Local 11 and OAPSE/AFSCME organized door-to-door canvasses in Canton, Dayton, Toledo and Westerville. The Ohio Education Association also held postcard writing events across the state on Saturday and Monday, and nearly 200 workers and community members turned out for a rally against S.B. 5 in Portsmouth organized by the Shawnee Labor Council.

Meanwhile, it is clear that S.B. 5 has some hurdles to clear before it can become law, giving working people time to educate the public about how bad this legislation is.

Writing in Firedoglake, David Dayen points out that in a surprise move, House Republicans scheduled three weeks of hearings on the bill rather than pass it outright.

?If they wanted to pass it unchanged, it wouldn?t take three weeks,? Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga told Dayen.

But the more they drag it out, the more Ohioans learn about the bill and find out they don?t like it.

Many expect the House, which is more conservative than the state Senate, to add even more onerous amendments to the bill. That could complicate passage of a new version of the bill in the Senate.

Read Dayen?s column, ?Not So Fast: Ohio?s Anti-Union S.B. 5 Has Several Hurdles to Clear,? here.

Another group that will be hurt by the bill is university faculty. In addition to scaling back the collective bargaining rights of all state employees, it would effectively prevent many faculty members from engaging in collective bargaining at all, by classifying them as managers, exempt from union representation, if they engage in any of several activities traditionally associated with their jobs.

“We were completely blindsided by it,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors,? told the Chronicle of Higher Education.

We have just started to fight. We are not going to settle for this.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on March 09, 2011 (boomark / email).