3
The Battle Begins
After state Sen. Shannon Jones dropped Senate Bill 5 on the legislature on February 1, we at the AAUP immediately began to formulate a strategy to preserve the things that were most important to us—defending academic freedom and shared governance at the University of Cincinnati and other colleges and universities.
Keys to the success of our struggle were two people who, by chance, were in place in Ohio to help. Debby Herman was executive director of the UC chapter of the AAUP. I had been on the search committee that hired her back in 2004, and I’d advocated strongly for the hire. Herman came from a union family and had real labor union experience with the UE.1 Coming to us with a doctorate from the University of Iowa, Dr. Herman was a natural organizer whose skills were essential to us as we met this crisis. The AAUP Ohio Conference had also made the important step in January 2011 of hiring a new executive director. Sara Kilpatrick’s first day of work was February 1, the day SB 5 was introduced. She hit the ground running. With a master’s in public administration from Ohio State University, Kilpatrick had worked as staff for the Ohio Senate Democratic Caucus as well as the Ohio State Medical Association. Kilpatrick knew her way around the political world of Columbus on a level that no one else in the AAUP did because of our traditional nonpolitical stance, and this made her invaluable. The decision by Dr. John Cuppoletti, professor of physiology at UC and then-president of the Ohio Conference, and the Conference board of trustees to hire Kilpatrick proved essential to our cause.2
We took some cold comfort in the fact that Senate Bill 5 never garnered another cosponsor, a very unusual situation and testimony to the fact that it was such bad legislation. In the first day or two, we reached out to others across the state and tried to absorb the broad dimensions of this attack on working people. Until we had a better understanding of this attack on us, we decided to stay low, “beneath the radar,” as Herman described it, joking that “beneath the radar means hiding and lying on the ground, where you often get rolled over by tanks anyway. So, whatever . . .” Dark humor served us well in the months to come.
Our national office and state conference soon sprang into action. The state conference and national AAUP president Cary Nelson worked to coordinate a strategy to defend the faculty. All across Ohio, AAUP chapters began planning how to defend their universities. The state conference created a communications committee—consisting of Marty Kich of Wright State and Dave Witt and Steve Aby of the University of Akron—and their work over the coming months was invaluable. Another of our great assets was Gary Rhoades, executive secretary in the national office. As a scholar at the University of Arizona in the history and practice of higher education, Rhoades was also an activist on national issues regarding higher education. His knowledge, enthusiasm, and positive attitude helped a great deal. As word about Senate Bill 5 spread across the country, Rhoades immediately contacted us, offering assistance and the resources of the national office of the AAUP.
Dr. Herman and I reached out to some of our contacts with the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT) and had a conference call with OFT president Sue Taylor and her staff. We were looking, in particular, for ways to tap into the political and union network in Ohio with which we had so little experience. This led to an invitation a few weeks later, through Taylor, from Tim Burga, Ohio AFL-CIO executive director, for us to attend a major meeting of labor organizations on January 28 at the Ohio State campus in Columbus. It was an important step for us because we made contacts there that have lasted to the present. Key political figures were in attendance including Sen. Sherrod Brown and a large number of state legislators. Especially impressive was former governor Ted Strickland, who gave an impassioned speech and said that he had just turned down an opportunity to serve at the International Labor Organization in Geneva because he wanted to stay and fight against these radical attacks on Ohio’s middle class. We also met with the head of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO, Doug Sizemore, and his staff. Sizemore, who would become a great ally in the coming months, agreed to allow us to have a representative sit in on their labor council meetings as a nonvoting member, since the AAUP is not an AFL-CIO affiliate. We also made contacts with Progress Ohio, Innovation Ohio, and Policy Matters Ohio, important organizations producing research and reports that could be used to combat the flawed right-wing narrative.
There were more than a hundred representatives from different labor organizations and progressive groups at the meeting, and we knew almost no one. At the beginning, representatives from the many organizations took turns standing and being introduced, going around the big room. Much to our surprise, Herman and I were also introduced. As we stood, the crowd gave us a good long round of applause, perhaps surprised that the professors, too, were in the house. It was a bond that would be solidified in the coming months.
It is time to be specific about what aspects of Senate Bill 5, which was more than five hundred pages long, were most disturbing to us. The bill had changed in some ways since its introduction and through its transfer to the House and its final passage. But it clearly was not moderated by the changes. In fact, especially in the case of university faculty, it became more radical as it moved through the Republican-dominated legislature. First and foremost, contrary to continuing statements from Gov. Kasich, Sen. Shannon Jones, Senate President Tom Niehaus, House Majority Leader William Batchelder, and other Republicans, Senate Bill 5 did not leave collective bargaining intact. Although it did allow unions to technically still exist, it eliminated their ability to genuinely engage in collective bargaining. It was immensely frustrating to me, as a former newspaper reporter, to see newspapers all over the state allowing the proponents of SB 5 to be dishonest on this central issue.
Republicans tried to use these minor tweaks in the bill to suggest that they were listening and being reasonable. Not true. The bill outlawed strikes for all public workers, thus eliminating the only real pressure union members can bring to bear on their employers—the right to withhold their work. Although the bill technically allowed for negotiations on wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment, more than a dozen other issues, including health care, were off the table. Obviously, if you can’t negotiate for health care, any increase in pay could be taken back by an increase in health care premiums—clearly a union-busting strategy used by extremists.3
Republicans never budged an inch on their central goal of eliminating the reality of collective bargaining. This is clear in the impasse resolution process. In the past, when an impasse was reached in negotiations, a professionally trained arbitrator would come into the process, analyze the situation, and impose a “fair” settlement. In the public safety sector (i.e., police and firefighters), arbitration had worked historically as a strike-prevention option. A study of arbitrators’ decisions over the years would show that arbitration was rarely used and that the decisions went against the union just about as often as against management. But the Republicans wrongly insisted that arbitration somehow gave enormous advantages to the unions, which was not true.
Having eliminated strikes and binding arbitration, Republican legislators created a process wherein, if the two sides reached an impasse, the decision would go to the nearest responsible elected body—the school board, the county commission, or the university board of trustees. These bodies were, of course, the management and thus management could then just impose its last offer. So, at any university, for example, both sides could talk as long as the administration wanted. Once an impasse had been reached, the university board of trustees—the management—could simply impose its last offer. Clearly, this process was not collective bargaining; at best it would be mere conversation.
Under Senate Bill 5, current contracts would be in effect until their terms ended. But even those could be eliminated if the state auditor declared a state of fiscal emergency. We expected that Gov. Kasich would do exactly that, to complete this political power play. For public school teachers, each new contract would have to be negotiated from scratch. No old language could be carried forward as teachers would have to engage in these new phony nonnegotiations. Pay could only be based on merit. In schools and universities, the ability to defend tenure would disappear. In one of the more bizarre requirements, an early version of SB 5 included provisions to make it illegal (an unfair labor practice) for any union leader to speak to persons such as school board or university board members during the course of contract negotiations about any matter that was “or may become” a subject of bargaining. Among the most common untruths repeated by proponents of SB 5 had to do with health insurance and pension plans. Sen. Jones led the way in suggesting that state employees paid for neither of these benefits. That has never been true. In the universities, for example, most unionized faculty pay between 10–15 percent of the cost of health care premiums, although it varies by contract. For retirement in the State Teachers Retirement System, faculty contribute 10 percent of their salary and do not qualify for Social Security.
Part of SB 5 also contained elements of typical right-to-work laws and made it illegal for employers to collect dues for its union employees through payroll deduction. Additionally, there could be no “fair share” fees collected from those who benefited from the union contract but chose not to join the union. All of this, of course, was the central reason for the attack on the unions. In the wake of Citizens United, the court decision that allows unlimited corporate political donations, the Republicans wanted to also eliminate the only force that balanced out those political contributions—political donations from labor unions. Crippling a major funding source for the Democratic Party was, without question, what Senate Bill 5 was all about.
Senate Bill 5 was, thus, a cold and calculated power grab. The Republicans were determined to take full advantage of the 2010 election that had put them in control of Ohio state government to impose a right-wing ideology on the state. “Flexibility” became the code word for union busting. Meanwhile, the AAUP, which had been determinedly not political for decades, was caught in the middle and targeted for elimination.
While digesting all this, we communicated a great deal with our colleagues at other universities. In Ohio, the AAUP’s collective bargaining chapters include UC, the University of Akron, Wright State University, Kent State University, the University of Toledo, Cincinnati State, Central State University, Cleveland State, Wilberforce University, North Central State, and Cuyahoga Community College. Bowling Green State University faculty had won a certification vote during 2010, but its administration stalled negotiations during the SB 5 battle. The first contract was finally completed in April 2013. Advocacy chapters, many of which were very active during the SB 5 fight, are located at Ohio University, Case Western Reserve University, the Ohio State University, John Carroll College, Lake Erie College, Sinclair Community College, the University of Dayton, Ohio Dominican University, Wilmington College, Defiance College, and Xavier University. By standing up for principles of academic freedom, shared governance, fair treatment of faculty, and devotion of resources to the instructional and research mission, the AAUP has helped set standards for public and private, union and nonunion, institutions alike. This is why the nonunion chapters were just as adamantly opposed to SB 5 as were the collective bargaining chapters.
This collection of colleges and universities gave us a statewide network of faculty interested in defending their institutions from the damage promised by SB 5. It also presented us with a challenge. The AAUP is not a top-down organization, and each chapter has its own culture and traditions. Thus, we had to work in the early weeks to find a way of balancing statewide coordination with the fact of independent chapters. In the end, through the work of a great many people, we reached a mode of operation that represented a lot of sharing of information and ideas but based on local actions. One of our greatest moments was coming together on several occasions in large numbers at the statehouse in Columbus, with other unions and fair-minded groups, to try to make our voices heard by the legislature.
This collaboration led to a communication to our statewide members from Kilpatrick and Dave Witt, chair of the communications committee, on February 8. “Our goal is to provide you with informative, data-driven, objective arguments,” they wrote, “that we hope you will build upon and take action. In the coming days and months, the Ohio Conference will provide our members with details of the legislation as these unfold, talking points for communicating directly with state legislators in your respective districts, sample letters to the editor, and research materials that will help effectively address this issue.”
They continued: “We also encourage each AAUP member to work closely with your local chapter leadership in the months to come. We will keep you informed so that your individual or chapter response can be most effective. Watch for our Action Alert in the next few days.”
There was no time to waste, after all, because the first hearing on the bill was set for Wednesday, February 9, just a little over a week after it was introduced. This clearly indicated Kasich and his right-wing allies were determined to railroad the bill through the legislature as quickly as possible. The first hearing was in the Senate’s Insurance, Commerce, and Labor committee.
Herman and I and several other faculty members carpooled to Columbus for the hearing, not knowing at all what to expect. What we encountered on that cold day in Columbus was inspiring. Inside the huge hall of the capitol building were at least a thousand people, many with signs and buttons identifying themselves as members of various unions from all over Ohio. The crowds continued to build all day as hundreds and hundreds more continued to arrive at the statehouse. No longer able to get into the statehouse, union members with signs crowded the grounds. The sound of automobile horns could constantly be heard as people driving past honked in support. As I sat in the hall, I looked up to see a plaque on a pillar. It said that Abraham Lincoln had spoken once from those very steps. I could not help but think what Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first Republican president, would think about today’s Republicans and the threat to our civil rights represented by Senate Bill 5. I reflected on the fact that each generation has to fight its own battles to preserve their liberty, as we were now doing.
Union members packed the rotunda of the capital and roared their opposition to the bill. I talked with firemen and schoolteachers, students and policemen, janitors and professors. This diverse crowd was united against this ruthless attack against all of us. In the large hall, some of the testimony was piped in so we could hear it. Former governor Ted Strickland made his way through the crowd to loud cheers. Some Democratic lawmakers set up a microphone from which they spoke defiantly, helpless as they were to stop the process.
Particularly appalling was Sen. Jones’s testimony. Jones did not use the state budget crisis as a major reason for the legislation. She said there might be “some savings” that year. In fact, Jones did not have a single projection of any cost savings for the short or long term, but said that she “thought” there would be savings in the future. A few of Jones’s own Republican colleagues asked very damning questions and seemed not to be very supportive of the bill’s intent. Although they were fewer in number, we became aware that there would be some Republicans on our side. Even though Jones explicitly said this bill wasn’t “political payback,” it became clear that diminishing union power was her intent. She could barely answer any questions about her own bill, which told many observers that her main goal was to punish unions and not get caught up in the details.
Some of the testimony is revealing:
Sen. Bill Beagle (R-Tipp City) Q: How will this bill ensure that public employee salaries aren’t totally gutted?
Jones A: There may be salary adjustments, up or down. The main point is that it gives employers flexibility.
Sen. Joe Schiavoni (D-Youngstown, Ranking Member) Q: Do you realize that state employees took $250 million in concessions last year? It seems to me that public employees are willingly trying to adjust to meet the challenges of the new budget and economy.
Jones A: But employers are still limited. We have to look at all contracts. This bill addresses structure.
Sen. Schiavoni Q: Do you think state employees are getting paid too much?
Jones A: I don’t know, but it needs to be disclosed.
Sen. Kris Jordan (R-Delaware) Q: What are the cost savings that will result from this bill, and how do you arrive at them?
Jones A: I can’t specify any specific dollar amount in the short term. But what this does is give Cabinet members the ability to adjust as they need to.
Sen. Tim Schaeffer (R-Lancaster) Q: What replaces binding arbitration?
Jones A: If there is no agreement reached after an alternative dispute resolution process, the current agreement would continue for one year until a new agreement can be reached.
Sen. Bill Seitz (R-Cincinnati) Q: As a follow-up to Sen. Schaeffer’s question, what happens if the current contract that provides for salary increases ends in 2010 and doesn’t prescribe an increase for the following year? What happens then?
Jones A: Then salaries are frozen.
Seitz Follow-Up: That certainly seems like that overwhelmingly favors the employer.
Sen. Seitz Q: Why are we prohibiting this totally, not even giving people the option to enter into a CBA? It may be the best choice in some situations.
Jones A: [When Jones failed to answer the question, the questioning continued.]
Sen. Hughes (R-Columbus) Q: How do we keep experienced and knowledgeable people under this new system?
Jones A: The system would be based on merit, so it would allow employers to keep high-quality people. Longevity shouldn’t drive salary.
Sen. Schiavoni Q: Do you know how many cuts and freezes that state employees have taken over the past six years?
Jones A: The public doesn’t know, which is why we need transparency so the public can understand.
Sen. Schiavoni Q: Am I correct in stating that you have not identified any cost savings that would result from this bill?
Jones A: This doesn’t have to do with the short-term budget situation, but I do believe it will yield some savings.
Sen. Faber (R-Celina) Q: Am I correct in that this bill would prescribe employees to pay 20 percent of their own health-care costs?
Jones A: Yes, public employees need to take more responsibility for their health care costs, have “skin in it.” This will help save the state money.
Sen. Faber Q: Why 20 percent?
Jones A: It is somewhat of an arbitrary number.
Sen. Tom Sawyer (D-Akron) Q: Do you know how much personnel and wages have risen since 1983, when the CB law first went into effect?
Jones A: No, I don’t.
Sawyer Follow-Up: They haven’t. State government levels are now the same as they were in 1983.
Sen. Sawyer Q: Can you give any examples of how employers don’t have enough flexibility?
Jones A: There will be people coming in to testify about that.
Sen. Sawyer Q: Do you know the number of CBAs that have been enacted in the last 27 years?
Jones A: No.
Sawyer Follow-Up: I think that’s a number you should know. It would be helpful to know how many CBAs resulted in strikes. My point is that the 1983 law has worked. The threat of binding arbitration keeps people bargaining amicably.
Sen. Eric Kearney (D-Cincinnati) Q: Do you know how this bill would impact current retirees?
Jones A: This bill in no way addresses the public pension systems.
Sen. Kearney Q: Do you think this bill will attract better teachers?
Jones A: Interesting question. I do think this bill lays the groundwork for innovation. The outcomes of children should be the driving factor determining salary, not longevity.
Kearney Follow-Up: I think we’re in danger of having good teachers leave if this bill would pass.
Sen. Kearney Q: Binding arbitration is rarely used . . .
Jones A: Then why are we so upset about it? It’s used as a stick and parties agree out of fear. That’s not how it should be.
Sen. Edna Brown (D-Toledo) Q: Will state employees be able to be represented by a union under this bill?
Jones A: I don’t know. I’m not a union member, and I’m not sure how exactly they would be affected.4
As The Columbus Dispatch noted the next day, the response to the bill from unions had been “quick and furious.” The Dispatch quoted Eddie Parks, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employee Association (OCSEA), who noted that state workers had taken five pay cuts in nine years and saved the state $250 million in its current contract alone. “No economic problem was ever solved by cutting the middle class,” he said.5
John Lyall, president of AFSCME Ohio Council 8, told The Cleveland Plain Dealer that Jones’ proposal was part of a national GOP effort to defund unions that have historically backed Democrats, including former governor Ted Strickland. “She’s nothing if not consistent in her hypocrisies,” Lyall said. “She would rather shove her right-wing politics down the throats of Ohioans than fix the economy.”6
Stephen Loomis, president of the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, and Jay McDonald, president of the Fraternal Order of Police of Ohio, both told The Plain Dealer that they didn’t like the proposed plan but would work to improve it for their members. “We’re going to be involved in this to the end,” Loomis said. “It’s going to be a long struggle.” We were particularly pleased when later in February, the firefighters and the police, when offered the opportunity to get out of SB 5 and negotiate something separately, both chose to stick with all of the unions. “Never in their wildest dreams,” Mark Sanders, president of the Ohio Association of Professional Firefighters, told The Plain Dealer, “did they think a governor who talked about examining collective bargaining would end up with something gutting their livelihood. I haven’t seen this response ever, really, after almost 30 years in fire service.”7
Our national staff was keeping up on events. Nseabasi Ufot, a member from the national office, communicated to us and shared some photos of the huge crowds at the statehouse. “Rooms FILLED with union members and supporters,” she wrote. “Very powerful.” Meanwhile, our chapter had its monthly meeting on the UC campus the next day. I had billed it to our membership as an opportunity to make plans to defend higher education in Ohio and begin coalition building. Executive Director Sara Kilpatrick and John Cuppoletti, president of the state conference, would be our special guests.
“Of course as higher education faculty,” I wrote to my colleagues, “we have particular concerns about this legislation which specifically targets us. But it was good today to be seated in an overflow room side-by-side with hundreds of uniformed police, firefighters, and nurses showing our shared opposition to this bill. [As] stalwarts of the AAUP . . . you know this struggle is not just about dollars and cents. It is about shared governance and academic freedom as well—about our ability to continue our work to enhance the university for our students and our communities.”
Our chapter meetings are usually modest affairs, with light turnout unless there is some burning issue. Nothing could be more “burning” than politicians trying to eliminate the AAUP, so there was a big crowd and some unanticipated guests: a crew from a local television station. I allowed the crew to film the meeting briefly and then stepped out in the hallway to talk with them, my first television interview. I can’t remember exactly what I said on the spur of the moment, but I did criticize the legislature’s actions as harshly as I could, and I remember that I pointed out that the impact of union busting would be lower wages, lower standards of living, lower educational attainment, and an undermining of the university system. Proponents of this legislation, I concluded, “were trying to recreate Mississippi with ice here in Ohio.”
One thing that became perfectly clear to us was that the ideologically driven Republicans in control of the legislature intended to move like lightning to adopt this destructive legislation before the state’s unions could move to counter the attack on the middle class. In the background, leadership of the major unions were coming together to consider a strategy, especially the big public unions—AFSCME, SEIU, AFT, NEA—where both the membership numbers and the money were. Early on, we became determined to work as closely as we could with them as only they had the resources to defend us. Alone, we faculty would easily be crushed by an administration whose leader had once referred to us contemptuously as “eggheads.”8 As the legislation worsened over the course of the political process, professors were targeted in a way that shocked even our union partners. “Why do they hate you?” they asked us, as puzzled as we were. Thus, we consulted with them as Senate Bill 5 rapidly moved forward. Keeping the AAUP in contact with our larger partners was part of Sara Kilpatrick’s job.
Looking back on the communications through February and March of 2011, the sense of doom was palpable. An avalanche of completely unexpected animosity was being directed at professors, and we seemed powerless to stop it. Yet still there was plucky determination. “No matter what happens,” wrote Debby Herman in a communication to the state leadership, “we will live to fight another day. I promise.”
“I don’t know if we can pull this off,” wrote Rudy Fichtenbaum, professor of economics at Wright State (who would be elected national AAUP president in 2012), “but I’m willing to go down fighting . . . I don’t want to concede that all the gains we have are gone. Of course, I have been known to tilt at windmills.”
“We are very proud of what you are doing in Ohio,” wrote Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress and a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University, “and I promise you that we will stand with you no matter what. Each day is a new fight, and I know we will continue to stand up for what is right.”
The crisis made it clear that if we were to mobilize our resources, we had to get better at communication. The state board and its communications committee did a great job as a catalyst in this effort. Our staff, Kilpatrick in Columbus and Herman and Stephanie Spanja and Eric Palmer at Cincinnati, as well as faculty and staff across the state, worked hard to put together a “tool kit” with information about SB 5. This included names and addresses of legislators to contact and talking points to coordinate our message. We could not know at the time that the legislature was so determined to crush us that talking to them would be a pointless exercise. We had faith in the political process, that we could make it respond to the injustice represented by Senate Bill 5.
As we and our colleagues across the state wrestled with developing a strategy, we became aware that one option was a statewide ballot referendum to repeal the bill if it was passed. The state’s major unions were discussing this, but one issue was paramount. Unlike the corporate community, union financial resources are limited and comparatively small. If unions, the AAUP included, were going to fund a statewide ballot referendum, it was going to be necessary to conserve financial resources for that fight and not squander money during the ideologically driven political process that was taking place in Columbus. Therefore, by the end of February, it became clear that there was going to be no big and expensive media campaign or funds expended on organizing while the bill was in process.
Of course, we recognized that staging and winning a statewide referendum was a long shot. “You’re absolutely right that a veto referendum or constitutional amendment will be extremely difficult to pull off,” Kilpatrick advised us. “It is a measure of last resort, and as many of our union allies see it, it may very well be our only option to defeat this thing.”
We were going to have to do this the old-fashioned way, through contacting our legislators and reasoning with them. We knew that the Democrats were opposed to this legislation, but they were outnumbered in both the House and the Senate. We also knew that there were a handful of Republicans who were either persuadable or were already opposed to the legislation. We hoped that it might be possible to convince a couple more Republicans to be more reasonable so that we could put a stop to this. In retrospect, we underestimated the determination of the conservative ideologues in the legislature and their ability, jointly with Gov. Kasich, to intimidate their colleagues to vote in lockstep. In the end, only a very few very strong individuals on the Republican side were able to stand up for what was right.
A column written by then-AAUP president Cary Nelson at this point caught the character of what was going on in the Buckeye State. “Ohio Is at War,” was the title of his piece. Although he had spent most of his academic career at the University of Illinois, he had spent time in Ohio. “[M]y decades of AAUP activism,” he wrote, “have added a new and more telling element to my fondness for the state: respect for Ohio’s brand of faculty activism and union solidarity . . . Like so many other principled struggles, the battle in Ohio and Wisconsin to retain faculty rights is really a struggle on behalf of faculty members and public sector employees everywhere. It is also a struggle over the soul of our democracy.”
Nelson was correct, of course, and what we were watching in Ohio were some of the worst abuses of the democratic process. And then there was Wisconsin. The battle in the Badger State hung over all of our work in Ohio. We were inspired by our friends and colleagues in Wisconsin as they fought against their own right-wing political extremists, headed by another Republican governor bent on destroying the political fabric of the state. We watched as their Senate, over massive public protests, passed legislation to end collective bargaining. Then we watched the Democratic members of the Wisconsin House flee the state to avoid being party to such infamous legislation. We began to see clearly what Debby Herman told us bluntly:
Ohio’s SB5 (and the simultaneous moves in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana) is not about what’s good for the state or the country. It’s an exercise in raw political power. These guys want to gut public employee unions before we get to 2012 . . . so that unions cannot effectively get out the base to vote for Democrats and to ensure that unions are financially weakened and cannot support Democrats in those races. (It’s no coincidence . . . Wisconsin and Ohio are swing states in presidential election years.)
Still, Gov. Kasich and his allies forged ahead. Given the huge public outcry over SB 5, the Senate planned a couple of more hearings and made time for more testimony. But because of the imposed need to rush, the testimony would go late into the wee hours of the morning. On February 17, Phil Hayes, the grandson of legendary Ohio State coach Woody Hayes, spoke to the committee. Hayes is a high school social studies teacher in Columbus. He spoke about the many teachers who had been important in his life:
Think about your favorite teacher. The one who motivated you to do more than the assignment or the class asked for; the one that inspired you to be where you are now.
These are the people who have helped you win; these are the people that, if they are still living, you should thank on National Teachers’ Day in person.
I wonder; if you were to tell them where you are, where you have been, what you have been through to get where you are and what you have done, what would they say about what you’re doing now in regards to Senate Bill 5?9
Saying that his grandfather had told him that the things you send into other people’s lives come back to you, Hayes made a special appeal directly to Sen. Kevin Bacon, who chaired the committee and was one of those Republicans primarily responsible for forcing the bill through so quickly. He pointed out that their fathers were lawyers, and they both have children with autism who have especially benefited from public school teachers. Hayes noted that his own daughter has been able to receive special therapy because of the health insurance negotiated by his union. “Senator Bacon, members of the committee,” Hayes testified, “this legislation will not just affect me, but my children. They are my family. This legislation punishes teachers, firefighters, police officers, state workers and their families. I urge you to pigeonhole this bill; to not send it to the floor for a vote.”
On February 18, a column I wrote for The Cincinnati Enquirer appeared side-by-side with a piece by Senate Bill 5 sponsor Shannon Jones, whose district encompasses part of the Cincinnati metro. It appears that after receiving my piece, Ray Cooklis, editorial page editor at the time, sought out a piece from Jones since I had sent mine unsolicited. My piece was intended as an op-ed, so it was suitably long at about six hundred words, roughly three times the length of a letter to the editor. I had had a couple of op-eds published by the now-defunct Cincinnati Post a few years earlier of roughly that length, so I knew it was appropriate. The Enquirer cut it to 341 words. Meanwhile, Shannon Jones was able to extol the virtues of Senate Bill 5 for 460 words.
The nearby Hamilton Journal-News ran my piece, with tiny changes, at its full length on February 18. More importantly, the Journal-News did not take out the heart of my argument and critique of Senate Bill 5 as the Enquirer had. “It’s hard to see how it is not political payback against unions who supported Ted Strickland in the last election,” I wrote to readers of the Journal-News. “Is this really how we want politics in the United States to operate: Those who vote the ‘wrong’ way are punished by the next administration? Not surprisingly, new Republican Gov. John Kasich says he is happy with the bill and is only concerned that it will not go far enough.”10
The Journal-News gave me room to explain some of the most important aspects of this attack on the university: “The AAUP champions shared governance in which faculty and administrators share in the decision-making process to ensure quality education and good financial stewardship. It is our experience that decisions made solely by business managers or accountants end in failure.” I also emphasized the importance of academic freedom: “Being able to teach students and engage in research that benefits the public without fear from political reprisal is what makes the university a great place for students and faculty alike. This is a faculty-driven organization at UC with dozens of faculty directly involved in work that makes this university a great place to be.”
While all this activity was moving forward, we began to reach out to other contacts. In Columbus, we cultivated some former Cincinnatians who lived in the city and had more regular contact with the state government and legislature. During our participation in the protests, we often met with our contacts to try to get a deeper understanding of the forces arrayed against the universities and the unions.
An important part of this process of reaching out to allies was building relationships with students who cared about the fate of their university. Even in my op-ed, I had closed with an appeal to UC alumni to stand by the faculty in this attack on the university: “We ask for Bearcats everywhere and the public at large to join with us to defend UC and higher education statewide.” Since nearly all the employees at UC are unionized workers, from the food service to the janitors to the security, we saw this correctly as an attack on the university community, not just the faculty. Students, by and large, agreed with us because they cared about the university.
A small coalition of student activists organized what would be the first of many protests on February 21 on McMicken Commons at the main campus. In a press release, the students wrote, “The rally intends to express the students’ solidarity with public workers across the state. Anyone who values democracy, education, and the work of UC’s professors and other public workers should be there. The future of Ohio depends on it.” Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I was not politically active. Through the SB 5 fight, I came to have great admiration for the many students at UC and across the state that I met through the campaign, who cared deeply about their state and their country and were willing to stand up against these destructive actions. Dan Traicoff at the University of Cincinnati and Will Klatt at Ohio State were particularly helpful.
It was, however, a regular disappointment that we could not generate really big crowds of students. There are a variety of reasons for this, but they mostly revolve around the fact that between work, school, and family, students have very little flexible time. That was all the more reason to genuinely appreciate those students who came to rallies, wrote letters, and talked to their families about Senate Bill 5 and other damaging legislation.
The day of the rally was cold and rainy, but dozens of students turned out. Several students spoke, giving voice to the defiance they had for what was being done in Columbus. I had a chance to speak briefly: “We will stand in rain, we’ll stand in the wind, we’ll stand in the snow, we’ll even stand in the dark, but we won’t stand for this attack on our right to collectively bargain,” I told them. The students responded with a roar of enthusiasm. We were going to be partners in this fight, I could see. The students soon created a Facebook site appropriately titled “Defend UC.”
In Columbus, the push to rapidly pass Senate Bill 5 continued unabated. Powerful testimony was given to the Senate committee by Sean Grayson, general counsel for AFSCME in Ohio. Piece by piece, Grayson explained why Senate Bill 5 was not needed for the “flexibility” that Jones said was so necessary. He questioned why universities would be specifically barred from negotiating with their employees. “Why?” he asked, noting that Jones had offered no reason for this prohibition. He added that AFSCME represented about five thousand union employees at state colleges and universities. Grayson talked about all the concessions, including furlough days, that his members have already agreed to at state and local levels. “SB 5 seeks to control local government in its collective bargaining relationships rather than letting local government make its own decisions,” Grayson said. “If you are concerned about preserving local government control, these proposals should concern you. Those who loathe government mandates should oppose SB 5.”11
In discussions among AAUP leadership, we had chosen Dr. Rudy Fichtenbaum, a leader in the Wright State University chapter, to testify for the AAUP before the Senate committee, and Kilpatrick was able to get him on the list. Fichtenbaum was a labor economist, so we felt he could speak from his position of expertise about the financially illegitimate aspects of Senate Bill 5. Fichtenbaum’s hard-hitting testimony on February 17 ultimately proved futile, but that just underlines what an ideologically blinded collection of politicians we were up against.
Fichtenbaum noted that Jones had said that punishing unions and seeking political retribution was not why she had submitted Senate Bill 5. If that was true, then the only possible reason for the bill must be the belief that collective bargaining had created the budget crisis, or that eliminating unions would solve the crisis. “Perhaps this is based on the myth that public employees are overpaid relative to employees in the private sector,” Fichtenbaum testified, “a myth stemming from simple comparisons of earnings between public and private sector employees. Such comparisons fail to take into account differences in education between public and private sector employees.”12
Fichtenbaum went on to cite several recent research studies that, in fact, demonstrate that the opposite about state employee compensation is true. For example, Fichtenbaum testified that, in an authoritative study that controlled for education and several other variables, it is clear that full-time state and local public employees earn about 5.9% less than their private sector counterparts. When hours worked are factored in, they earn 3.3% less. The same study also analyzed total compensation (wages plus benefits) and found state and local public employees receive annual compensation of about 6% less, and hourly compensation of about 3.5% less.13
Research also points out other facts that run counter to the pro-Senate Bill 5 argument, Fichtenbaum emphasized. For example, states without collective bargaining are actually in worse financial condition, with bigger deficits, than states that do have collective bargaining. Further, Fichtenbaum argued that the statistics point to the real problem undermining Ohio’s economy. For years, Ohio has underfunded its university system. Ohio is thirty-seventh in the nation in the percentage of its citizens who have a college degree. Fichtenbaum agreed with Sen. Jones on one point: that the world has changed. That new world’s economy is knowledge-based and needs a well-educated workforce. “In short,” Fichtenbaum testified, “to create the high-paying middle-class jobs of the future, we need a world-class system of higher education, and this means attracting the best and brightest from around the world to come teach and undertake research at state universities in Ohio.”
But there is a growing gap in compensation between Ohio’s public universities and the private colleges and universities. Eliminating collective bargaining would further expand that wage gap and further undermine public education in Ohio. It would “make it more difficult for us to attract the faculty we need to build a world-class system of public colleges and universities.” And, Fichtenbaum observed, a great system of higher education needs a well-funded public school system to prepare students for colleges and universities, and so the attack on public school teachers would be counterproductive. There is even a correlation, he said, between higher teacher salaries and greater numbers of college graduates in a state.
In a line that drew a rousing roar from the crowd even at that late hour, Fichtenbaum testified, “We need police and firefighters. These people put their lives on the line every day. There are no statues of Wall Street bankers who have died keeping us safe or carrying children from burning buildings.”
Fichtenbaum concluded his testimony:
So the bottom line is that public employees in Ohio are not overpaid, and they are not responsible for the current budget crisis. Ohio’s public employees are not the problem. They are part of the solution! It is unfortunate that the issue of collective bargaining rights for public employees has even come up at this time when Ohio faces a budget crisis. The Bill’s sponsor, Senator Jones, acknowledged in her testimony that eliminating collective bargaining rights for public employees would have little if any effect on Ohio’s immediate budget problems. I submit that curtailing collective bargaining rights for public employees will be outright harmful to Ohio in the longer term—by weakening our state’s competitive position in having a well-educated citizenry, a safe environment in which to raise families, and workplace conditions that engender satisfied employees who will stay with their public employer rather than leaving at the first opportunity.
February 22 was one of our biggest turnouts during the whole protest process. Although we were never able to match the throngs that turned out in Madison, Wisconsin, to protest similar legislation, we had at least ten thousand at the statehouse that day. Even Gary Rhoades, the executive secretary at the national AAUP office, had flown in to stand with us. It is hard to say how many UC faculty were there, certainly more than 40. Others, of course, had class and other university responsibilities. We carpooled again to Columbus, and after a stop by the AAUP office only a block from the capitol, we bundled up for the walk over to the rally taking place.
It was then that we encountered a most shocking situation. The Capitol police, apparently under the direction of the Republican leadership, were to allow only 1,200 people into the building, leaving thousands more stranded on the steps and sidewalk. This was another example of the Republican disdain for the people whose unions they were trying to undermine. On the positive side, anyone who, like me that day, saw this unreasonable act by the people in power in Columbus had to be convinced, as I was, that this was not an ordinary political action going on in the American tradition but something alien and ugly. As it began to snow, thousands of people sang “God Bless America” to the accompaniment of the bagpipers from the various firemen’s unions. “This is our house. Let us in,” the people chanted repeatedly. Under threat of legal action from the Democratic Party leadership, the police relented and allowed more people into the building. But along with most of the crowd, I was never able to get into the Capitol that day.14
In the opposing testimony in the Senate committee, the only one that was really unpredictable and surprising was that of Bruce Johnson, president of the Inter-University Council. Sad to say, Ohio’s faculty discovered that the Inter-University Council, the organization of university presidents, was actually a Trojan horse working against its own faculty.
The group had previously been relatively inactive except as a place for presidents of the universities to discuss common issues among themselves. Johnson was a lawyer with a law degree from Capital University in Columbus but no experience in higher education. His appealing qualifications for being a Kasich appointee were that he was a Republican and had served in the Senate and also in several capacities in the Gov. Bob Taft administration, including as lieutenant governor. Thus he was clearly someone who could push the governor’s agenda for higher education, which, in this case, included union busting.
In his testimony in support of Senate Bill 5, Johnson said the collective bargaining system “results in higher labor costs, unnecessary duplication of personnel, and inefficient operations because of limits on what workers can and cannot do.” Johnson said Senate Bill 5 would help Ohio’s public colleges and universities build an environment that fosters efficiency, creativity, and productivity. Anyone who knows firsthand about the academic world knows that what Johnson said was highly inaccurate and inflammatory. This distortion of the facts by Senate Bill 5’s proponents, however, became par for the course as the political process unfolded and later as the campaign against it took place.
First and foremost, it is well known that a primary driver of higher labor costs, unnecessary duplication of personnel, and inefficient operations can be attributed to poor management decisions by university administrations across the state. The Goldwater Institute, no left-leaning think tank, determined in 2010 that between 1993 and 2007 administrative costs had grown by 61.2 percent, while instructional expenses trailed at only 39.3 percent. Similarly, the number of full-time administrators per hundred students increased more than 39 percent, but the number of faculty devoted to teaching, research, and service increased by only 17.6 percent.15
Anyone familiar with Ohio’s universities can testify to the burgeoning corps of administrators, vice provosts, deans, assistant deans, and deanlets across the system. By comparison, there is constant pressure to replace retiring full-time faculty with part-time instructors so that benefits and decent pay do not have to be provided. That a spokesman for Ohio’s university presidents would distort the facts so completely was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.