Michael Cooper & Katharine Q. Seelye, Wisconsin Leads Way as Workers Fight State Cuts, N.Y. Times, Feb. 19, 2011, at A1.
The unrest in Wisconsin this week over Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut the bargaining rights and benefits of public workers is spreading to other states.
Already, protests erupted in Ohio this week, where another newly elected Republican governor, John Kasich, has been seeking to take away collective bargaining rights from unions.
… The images from Wisconsin — with its protests, shutdown of some public services and missing Democratic senators, who fled the state to block a vote — evoked the Middle East more than the Midwest.
The parallels raise the inevitable question: Is Wisconsin the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights?
… “We think that what’s going on in Wisconsin actually helps us here in Ohio,” said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for Governor Kasich, who is supporting a bill that would limit collective bargaining rights.
… In Columbus, Ohio, Tea Party organizers said they had 300 to 500 people turn out on Thursday for a counterdemonstration against several thousand union members.
“We weren’t well-versed in everything about the bill and why they’re doing what they’re doing except that we’re broke as a state,” said Adriana Inman, an organizer with the Fairfield Tea Party in Southwest Ohio, who attended the rally. She said that her group had many union members.
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New York Times: A Watershed Moment for Public-Sector Unions (2/19/2011)
In the half century since Wisconsin became the first state to give its public workers the right to bargain collectively, government employee unions have mushroomed in size and power — so much so that they now account for more than half of the nation’s union members.
But the legislative push by Wisconsin’s new governor, Scott Walker, a Republican, to slash the collective bargaining rights of his state’s public employees could prove a watershed for public-sector unions, perhaps signaling the beginning of a decline in their power — both at the bargaining table and in politics.
Three-fourths of the states allow collective bargaining by some or all of state or local government employees. And labor’s friends and foes alike agree that if the Wisconsin legislation passes, it will create momentum for similar bills in Ohio, Indiana and other states.
“These kinds of high-profile public-employee battles have enormous stakes,” said Benjamin Sachs, a professor of labor law at Harvard. “We’re still feeling the consequences of President Reagan confronting the union in the air controllers’ strike. For anyone interested in union rights, the fight in Wisconsin couldn’t be more important.”
… The national importance of the Wisconsin fight is clear. President Obama weighed in on labor’s behalf on Wednesday, calling Mr. Walker’s proposals “an assault on unions.” And the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, praised Mr. Walker for “confronting problems that have been neglected for years at the expense of jobs and economic growth.”
AP: Ohio House panel prepares for vote on union bill (3/29/2011)
Democratic lawmakers have delivered boxes containing more than 65,000 opponent signatures to an Ohio House committee that is preparing to vote on a bill to curtail collective bargaining for 350,000 public workers.
The House labor committee is preparing a vote Tuesday on the legislation. Democrats set the boxes in front of the committee chairman’s desk, but they were quickly removed.
The committee planned to adopt at least 10 substantive changes to the legislation before voting. The changes include removing jail time as a possible penalty for public workers who participate in strikes and making clear that public safety workers could negotiate over equipment.
A vote of the full House could come as soon as Wednesday. The Senate would have to consider any changes made.
LA Times: Anti-union push gains steam nationwide (4/2/2011)
More than 700 bills have been introduced in virtually every state. Nearly half of the states are considering legislation to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Unions are girding for a fight.
Now that the governors of Ohio and Wisconsin have signed bills to limit public workers’ collective bargaining rights, their fellow Republicans in other states are expected to gain momentum in their efforts to take on unions.
“Now it’s Tennessee’s turn,” the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, said in a recent letter posted on his Facebook page. Citing Ohio and Wisconsin, he urged support for legislation that would “prevent government employee unions from locking taxpayers into long-term union contracts that we cannot afford.”
The National Conference of State Legislatures is tracking an explosion of 744 bills that largely target public-sector unions, introduced in virtually every state.
“Almost every week, I read of at least one more bill to restrict union rights at the state level,” said John Logan, director of the labor studies program at San Francisco State University.
Nearly half of the states are considering legislation to limit public employees’ collective bargaining rights. In New Hampshire, the House last week approved a measure that one union leader assailed as “Wisconsin on steroids.”
But it’s not just budgetary concerns driving Republican officeholders to take on unions, traditionally a strong Democratic ally.
In Maine, the newly elected Republican governor ordered the removal of a mural depicting the state’s labor history from a state building because, his spokeswoman said, it portrayed a one-sided message supporting organized labor.
… Adam Brandon, spokesman for the conservative group FreedomWorks, said he expected unions to spend millions of dollars to try to repeal the Ohio legislation and to prevent similar legislation from passing in other states.
“Can you imagine if Ohio’s economy starts to grow” in the wake of the bill’s passage? he asked. “Defending the status quo in the state of Ohio, I think, is a pretty dangerous place to be.”
… In Wisconsin, unions are gathering signatures to recall Republican lawmakers who supported the new law, whose implementation has been delayed while court challenges are pending.
And in Ohio, unions are gearing up to gather the 231,149 signatures they need to put a measure on the November ballot to repeal their state’s new law that limits collective bargaining rights and bans strikes by about 350,000 public employees.
“We’re going to be contributing heavily to the recall efforts in Wisconsin and to the referendum efforts to have SB5 in Ohio repealed,” said Harold A. Schaitberger, general president of the International Assn. of Fire Fighters.
As the fight intensifies, a Gallup poll released Friday shows that 48% of respondents agreed with public employee unions compared with 39% who backed the governors.
“But it’s not just budgetary concerns driving Republican officeholders to take on unions…” Does anyone really think it’s budgetary concerns driving this?
Also, I could imagine Ohio’s economy starting to grow: http://www.vindy.com/news/2011/jan/09/prison-industry-a-sure-bet/
AP: Ohio – Legal Hurdle Is Cleared in Effort to Repeal Anti-Union Law (4/16/2011)
Opponents of the state’s new law restricting union rights won approval Friday to move forward with their effort to get a referendum on the ballot this November, and they say they have 10,000 volunteers ready to gather signatures. The state attorney general and secretary of state certified that the group called We Are Ohio can start collecting the more than 231,000 signatures needed by June 30. The law signed by Gov. John Kasich, a Republican, affects more than 350,000 public workers. It allows unions to negotiate wages but not health care or pension benefits. It bans strikes and replaces automatic pay increases with merit raises or performance pay.
Youngstown News: 1.3 million seek vote on SB 5 (6/30/2011)
Mahoning County Sheriff’s Sgt. T.J. Assion marched through downtown Columbus Wednesday to oppose a collective-bargaining law signed earlier this year by Gov. John Kasich.
He joined thousands of officers, firefighters, teachers and other union members who paraded past the Statehouse en route to the Secretary of State’s Office to drop off nearly 1.3 million petition signatures aimed at repealing Senate Bill 5.
“We are public servants, we are public employees [and] the governor has trampled all over our rights — the governor and his cronies — with this new law commonly referred to as SB5,” said Assion, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 141. “We’ve collected … over 1 million signatures on petitions, and it’s time to turn those in and show the governor that he’s not as popular as he thinks he is, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is and that he’s dead wrong.”
The event Wednesday included thousands of chanting walkers, dozens of motorcycle riders, a vintage fire truck and a semi trailer load of petitions that were turned in to Secretary of State Jon Husted one day before the deadline for qualifying for the general election.